Re:Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage. Our ...
by lxgr on Thursday July 24, 2025 @04:48PM
(#44675920)
They still have tons of ground-based infrastructure that has all the regular failure modes. I suspect the satellites also route IP traffic statically, and they only do so to a fixed set of ground gateways all operated by Starlink (compared to e.g. Iridium, which makes in-space switching decisions and can at least continue ongoing phone calls between two devices without actually needing a reachable ground gateway).
National telcos manage to take themselves out countrywide from time to time too, so I'd assume the same usual suspects apply: Routing problems, botched global configuration changes etc.
If anything, due to centralization, ubiquitous and effectively free connectivity, and centralization/automation of configuration changes, the blast radius of any given error or malicious action has probably been steadily increasing over the years.
National telcos manage to take themselves out countrywide from time to time too, so I'd assume the same usual suspects apply: Routing problems, botched global configuration changes etc.
If anything, due to centralization, ubiquitous and effectively free connectivity, and centralization/automation of configuration changes, the blast radius of any given error or malicious action has probably been steadily increasing over the years.