On July 24, a widespread Service Interruption in Starlink satellite services affected thousands of consumer and business subscribers across the globe. As usual, the outage-report volumes are just the tip of the iceberg. What lies beneath the Starlink outage is few magnitudes bigger, having subscribers that experienced issues but didn’t or couldn’t report them. The outage lasted for approximately 2.5 hours.  

This is the longest outage Starlink has suffered thus far in its operations as a commercial service provider. Officially, the root cause was a “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network” as posted in X platform by Starlink’s VP of engineering. The harsh reality is that we might not know the exact root cause, albeit FCC’s requirement to receive a Final Communications Outage Report within 30 days.  

That’s not great news for anyone. It is important to remember that networks will always have outages and performance degradations; it’s a matter of physics, human intervention, and technology complexity. What made this newsworthy was that it’s the lead high-speed satellite carrier that enterprises and consumers depend on. 

What are the key lessons for IT leaders from this unfortunate event? 

  • IT leaders must revisit their non-redundant connectivity strategy. Especially for companies that rely on non-redundant primary satellite connectivity, it may be time to reconsider that approach and whether other technologies might complement your needs. In cases where satellite is the only option, consider bringing a backup satellite connectivity from a different carrier. This strategy requires business, networking, and applications teams to collaborate and assess the applications’ resilience and tolerance to network outages and lower speed/higher latency backup connectivity.  
  • Organizations must hold satellite providers to the highest standards. There’s more to learn here. Terrestrial carriers are held to the highest standards — often with SLAs of five nines of availability for a year; that means being unavailable for no more than 5 minutes and 15 seconds a year. Being down for 2.5 hours … that’s unacceptable. Starlink discloses its uptime or network availability SLA for priority services (business) as three nines — being unavailable for 8 hours and 46 minutes a year. It’s time for IT leaders to demand higher uptimes. Starlink touted that it’s ready to provide network resiliency.  
  • All networking orgs must accelerate observability and AI investments.  As noted above, networks will always have outages and performance degradations. Uptime and fast remediation are essential for customer experience. This makes network automation, network performance management (including visibility, observability, and AIOps), application performance management, fast analytics for root-cause analysts, and systemwide improvements via AI all essential. Automation and AI won’t predict every outage, but it can help adjust, find a workaround, and apply remedies. 

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