Elon Musk forced to apologise over 'rare' global outage that affected tens of thousands

Elon Musk has been forced to apologise after tens of thousands of people were left without internet connection.

It comes after the tech mogul's satellite internet constellation company Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX, suffered a global blackout.

At 9pm yesterday, 24 July, Starlink posted on X to say it was experiencing a network outage, adding that they were 'actively implementing a solution.'

Musk shared the message, writing: "Service will be restored shortly. Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again."

Despite trying for a speedy solution, Starlink customers were left with no connection for several hours, with the problem persisting into the early hours of this morning (25 July).

Many frustrated customers took to X to vent their frustrations as the internet outage caused disruption to their work.

"I couldn’t attend a meeting, now I’m in serious trouble. You owe us a refund," one wrote, while another added: "You guys gonna reimburse us for this massive outage that's got me kicked out of work?"

Meanwhile, others were quick to compare Starlink to other internet providers which have more regular outages, pointing out, 'this is the first time in a year Starlink has been down,' adding: "Stop complaining about a refund for 1 hour or whatever it will be lol. You really going to complain about 1 hour or $0.17 of service?"

Another Musk fan commented: "Starlink, huge company. Brief outage and the owner and CEO immediately apologises for the interruption and reports to the public that service will soon be restored.

"Wow!! Never seen Comcast, ATT, Verizon, etc have such incredible customer service, let alone from ownership. Elon rocks!"

And a third wrote: "It is wild people are complaining about #Starlink going down for the first ever. We get internet through the air from machines flying through space. We all could use some gratitude and perspective."

Musk launched Starlink with a goal to provide high speed internet access to remote areas of the world, which would usually struggle with traditional broadcast access.

It uses a satellite constellation in low Earth orbit, at around 550km altitude, to provide internet to all corners of the Earth, including Maritime and aviation internet.

So, while its capabilities are undoubtedly impressive, those in remote areas with no access to any other forms of internet connection are bound to feel frustrated when any issues arise.

LADbible has contacted Starlink for comment.