Musk’s Starlink hit with hours-long outage after rollout of T-Mobile satellite service

Elon Musk‘s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.

There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.

Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.

At 4:30 p.m. ET, Musk apologized for the outage on X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”

At 6:23 p.m. ET, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, said in an X post that service “has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours.”

About two hours after that post, Starlink wrote on X that service was fully restored.

Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.

T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach.”

Starlink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the T-Satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage.

Musk’s social media site X, which he purchased as Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, has been hit with a number of outages in the past months.

The site had disruptions in early July. During another outage in May, Musk said that “major operational improvements need to be made.”

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Jordan Novet contributed to this report