T-Mobile’s Satellite Service Faces Outage Merely Hours after Launch

After months of testing and teasing, T-Mobile finally launched T-Satellite, its Starlink-powered satellite messaging service, to millions of users on July 23. However, merely hours after the official launch, T-Mobile’s T-Satellite service suffered a major outage. Elon Musk’s Starlink announced a “network outage” on Thursday, which impacted the newly launched T-Mobile satellite messaging service.

The Starlink-backed satellite service went down just hours after going live

Soon after T-Mobile launched its Starlink-powered T-Satellite service, there were over 60,000 user reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs problems. After the newly launched service went down, Starlink, owned and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, posted on X about the network outage and said that it was actively implementing a solution.

Even Elon Musk apologized for the outage on X. A couple of hours later, SpaceX’s VP of Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, posted on X that service “has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours.” Nearly two hours after that post, Starlink confirmed that it had fully restored the service.

It looks like the network outage affected T-Mobile’s T-Satellite texting service just a few hours after the much-anticipated launch. The issue impacted tens of thousands of users across the US. Starlink said that the outage was due to the failure of key internal software services that operate its core network.

What is the T-Mobile T-Satellite service all about?

For those unaware, T-Satellite is a satellite-backed texting service by T-Mobile. After a six-month beta with more than 2 million testers, the telecom operator’s service is now available across the nation. It allows text messaging, emergency alerts, and location sharing functionalities in areas with no cell coverage. This solution is capable of connecting smartphones in areas far beyond the traditional networks.

T-Mobile Experience Beyond subscribers can access the T-Satellite service at no cost. However, T-Mobile charges other plan users $10 per month for the service. Interestingly, the service is not just for T-Mobile subscribers. AT&T and Verizon customers can also access it by paying a monthly subscription fee. These two top telcos will also launch their versions of satellite texting services later this year.