What changed
Starlink went down worldwide for about two and a half hours on Thursday, Jul 24, 2025, starting around 3 p.m. Eastern. Drive Tesla Canada reported more than 61,000 user reports at the peak on Downdetector, from North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.
SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, attributed it to the “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.” Elon Musk apologised and said SpaceX would fix the root cause.
When
Jul 24, 2025, per Drive Tesla Canada’s report of Jul 25, 2025. This post is more than 90 days old and is kept as background; it is the largest Starlink outage we have a source for.
Who is affected
All Starlink customers online at the time. We include it because owners asked what an outage means for a referral that is still pending.
What it means for you
An outage doesn’t pause or reset a referral. The rule is that the new customer stays on a high-speed plan for two full monthly billing cycles; a few hours offline doesn’t change their plan. What can end a referral is the new customer cancelling or moving to Standby before those cycles finish, and a bad first week is when people are most tempted to.
The referral terms don’t mention outages, and we haven’t seen Starlink text about service credits for outages in the referral context.
What to do now
If a friend you referred has a bad first week, tell them what you know about outages in your area, and remind them of the 30-day hardware return window if they decide Starlink isn’t for them. Don’t pressure anyone to stay for your reward; the terms also require a genuine customer.
What stays the same
Referral rules didn’t change because of the outage.
What we don’t know yet
Whether Starlink gave customers bill credits for this outage, and whether such a credit would interact with the free month. We have no source for either.
How to check it yourself
During an outage, the Starlink app shows whether your dish is connected, and Starlink has posted updates on its X account. Downdetector counts are user reports, not a measure of how many customers were offline. For a pending referral, the friend’s account shows their plan and billing dates; if they are still on a high-speed plan, the outage doesn’t change the count.