Elon Musk has apologised after a major outage at his SpaceX satellite firm Starlink plunged tens of thousands of users into an unexpected internet blackout.
As many as 61,000 users across the world were affected by the service failure caused by an internal software issue at around 7pm UK time, according to Downdetector.
Posting on his social media platform X, Musk acknowledged the disruption and assured users the issue would be resolved and would not happen again.
"Service will be restored shortly. Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again," he wrote.
Starlink confirmed the fault had been fixed around six and a half hours after it was first reported.
The company said on X: "The network issue has been resolved, and Starlink service has been restored.
"We understand how important connectivity is and apologise for the disruption."
Starlink has more than six million users across approximately 140 countries and territories.
It is part of Musk's SpaceX mission, to provide internet to remote areas around the world – including war zones.
Starlink terminals have been used by Ukraine's army operations since February 2022.
Tens of thousands of terminals cover Ukraine, with up to 500 purchased by the US Department of Defence in 2023.
Earlier this month, Musk said his xAI company’s latest AI model Grok 4 is “better than PhD level in everything”.
Describing the latest model as “the smartest AI in the world” at its launch, the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla boss said it had received 100 times more training than the Grok 2 version, which was replaced by Grok 3 in February.
The announcement comes in the wake of antisemitic commentary from the Grok 3 chatbot, which included praise of Adolf Hitler.
Grok’s X account posted: “We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts.”
Some experts have said Musk has attempted to steer away from other chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, which is considered “woke”.
In June, he invited X users to help train the chatbot with “divisive facts” which he described as “things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true".
This month, Linda Yaccarino said she was stepping down two years after Musk hired her to run X, which he bought for $44 billion (£32.4 billion) in late 2022.
