SpaceX CEO Elon Musk Reflects On Recent Starlink Outage: 'I Wish We Were Never Down...'

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Friday reflected on the recent Starlink outage in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

What Happened: “I wish we were never down, but Starlink will keep improving rapidly,” Musk wrote. He was responding to users discussing the perks of Starlink over ground-based internet. While one user mentioned living in an area without gigabit ethernet, another commented on the uptime of Starlink.

SpaceX’s Starlink refers to broadband satellite internet provided with the help of satellites in low-Earth orbit. Last Tuesday, Starlink faced a network outage, which was resolved in about an hour.

Goals, Future For Starlink: Musk said in his post that the goal with Starlink was to provide internet with latency consistently lower than 20ms to major data centers within a region. Latency can be simplified as the time taken for data to go between the user and satellite.

“This is extremely difficult, but we will get there,” Musk wrote.

Regarding bandwidth, the CEO said that it will continue to improve with new generation of satellites and user terminal. SpaceX launched the first Starlink satellites to orbit in 2019.

“Our toughest challenge with bandwidth is peak throughput in areas with high user density,” Musk wrote, while adding that it is easier to achieve high bandwidth in areas with lesser population.

Earlier this year, SpaceX also changed Starlink prices depending on capacity in users’ areas. Starlink cut prices in areas with excess capacity and hiked monthly charges in areas with limited capacity.

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