The Starlink Outage and Its Impact on Community Gateways
Summary
Last month, Starlink suffered its largest outage in years, arguably its biggest since becoming a major internet provider. In addition to the millions of individual customers around the world, the outage disconnected the Community Gateways, customers of Starlink’s new transit service. In this post, we delve into the outage and its impact on these far-flung networks.
On July 24, LEO satellite operator Starlink suffered a global outage lasting more than two hours, making it its longest outage since becoming a major service provider. The last outage that was anywhere near this scope and duration occurred in November 2022.
As depicted below, traffic to Starlink (AS14593) in our aggregate NetFlow began a precipitous drop at 19:13 UTC before beginning to return at 21:28 UTC — 2 hours and 15 minutes after the outage began.
Below is a screenshot of the outage as seen in Georgia Tech’s IODA tool. While active measurement (blue line) dropped in line with our traffic statistics, the BGP routes (green line) appeared unfazed.
To be clear, there was a handful of Starlink BGP routes that went down during the outage (such as 141.109.84.0/24, pictured below), but the vast majority were unfazed.
Impact on Community Gateways
In March, we discussed Starlink’s new venture into offering transit for service providers in remote locations with an offering called a Community Gateway. While this outage did not involve the withdrawal of more than a few of AS14593’s routes, it did appear to have an observable impact on the transit provided to these new Community Gateway customers.
Below is an IODA visualization of Nauruan state-owned Cenpac Net (AS55722), which became Starlink’s first transit customer back in January. The graphic shows both BGP (green) and active measurement (blue) dropping to zero during the first 40 minutes of Starlink’s outage on July 24.
Impacts of the Starlink outage on other Community Gateway customers we’ve identified can also be seen here: AS23917, AS141368, AS58524, and AS134783.
Using Kentik’s BGP Router Viewer, we can take a closer look at the drop in propagation of one of Cenpac’s prefixes. Soon after Starlink’s outage began, this route disappeared (at 19:18 UTC) but returned at 20:02 UTC.
The most recent addition to the Starlink Community Gateway customer set is Ecuadorian provider CNT’s service to the Galápagos Islands via AS29748. Back on July 19, just five days before the outage, LEO-satellite operator Starlink (AS14593) displaced MEO-satellite operator O3b (AS60725) as the primary transit provider for this location.
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Perhaps as a consequence of the recency of the change, CNT was able to revert to SES’s O3b service when Starlink went down. The scramble for available transit was preserved in BGP and visible in our BGP visualization below:
A curious side effect of the outage was seen in Kiribati.
Starlink service for individual users on the remote Pacific island was activated back in March, which was followed by a Facebook post from Kiribati’s Ministry of Communications and Transport, announcing the construction of a Community Gateway in Betio, South Tarawa.
The post included photos of the site’s assembly with Starlink’s distinctive four white radomes, stating that the system would be online at the end of April 2025. To date, no Kiribati provider has appeared in BGP as a customer of Starlink (AS14593).
During the outage on the 24th, two routes (103.250.3.0/24 and 202.58.250.0/24, shown below) originated by Amalgamated Telecom Holdings Kiribati Ltd (ATHKL, AS134783) went down. No Starlink ASNs appear in the AS paths of these routes — instead, they rely on transit from satellite-based provider Speedcast.
According to its website, Speedcast is an official Starlink reseller and integrator — listing Community Gateways as a product they offer. It is likely that this outage revealed the presence of Kiribati’s active Community Gateway white-labeled by Speedcast and without the presence of Starlink ASNs in BGP.
Conclusion
While the July 24 Starlink outage was a headache for many, it offered a rare peek behind the curtain of their growing Community Gateway service. It seems some of these remote outposts, like Cenpac Net in Nauru, were left momentarily adrift in the digital ocean. Others, like CNT in the Galápagos, proved nimble, briefly reverting to the satellite-based service Starlink was meant to replace. And then there’s Kiribati, whose “invisible” Community Gateway was revealed by the outage.
As Starlink continues to expand its reach, hopefully, these insights will lead to even more resilient internet infrastructure. After all, nobody wants their remote island paradise to become a digital desert island.
