Starlink outage impacted Starshield, its defense communications service

An outage this week of Starlink, the satellite internet service run by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, did have an impact on some services in the federal government. 

While several civilian federal agencies told FedScoop that the service interruption didn’t disrupt operations, the U.S. Space Force confirmed that Starshield, the military-focused communications service on the Starlink network, was taken offline during the outage. 

“The Space Systems Command Commercial SATCOM Communications Office procures Starshield Global Access services over the Starlink Satellites/network,” a spokesperson for Space Systems Command told FedScoop. 

The spokesperson continued: “As such, the global outage did affect CSCO customers for the entire duration of the outage (~2.5hrs for most users). Services had a partial restoration midway through the outage and a complete restoration by the stated end time.”

Defense customers are currently able to access Starshield through the Space Force, among other procurement mechanisms, SpaceX’s website states. SpaceX says Starshield is for “national defense use cases” while Starlink “is not intended for any military end-uses or end-users.” 

Several branches of the U.S. military are currently testing or using Starshield, including the Air Force and the Navy. A spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard told FedScoop earlier this month that the agency began installing both Starlink and Starshield back in 2023.

Meanwhile, several other civilian agencies said they weren’t affected heavily by the Starlink outage. Others didn’t respond by publication time. 

For instance, there was no known impact to operations at Customs and Border Protection, which uses the technology for video and personal location information, a spokesperson told FedScoop.

Marshall Thompson, from the National Interagency Fire Center, said he wasn’t aware of the Starlink outage impacting any fire response efforts, at least in regard to radio operations and communications kits they use.

A spokesperson for the National Science Foundation said employees in Antarctica who use the service were unaffected since Starlink was not used for primary operations.

Earlier this week, FedScoop reported that Starlink is increasingly showing up at both state and federal agencies, with subpar customer service support cited for some government customers. Experts who spoke to FedScoop also expressed concern about the government’s increasing dependency on primarily one satellite internet provider for certain high-stakes and remote applications.  

On Friday, Reuters reported that Musk ordered SpaceX staff to cut off Starlink during a 2022 Ukrainian counteroffensive. The move, which left Ukrainian troops without communications access, raises ongoing concerns that the world’s richest man might use his control over the service to influence political and military outcomes.  

The Starlink outage had mostly been resolved as of Thursday night.

“Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours,” Michael Nicolls, a vice president of engineering at SpaceX, said in a tweet. “The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network. We apologize for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again.”