Starlink, owned by Elon Musk, has changed the game in terms of internet accessibility in rural and other underserved areas lacking high-speed broadband infrastructure. It has 2 million US subscribers, and more than 6 million globally.

Users in the U.S. and Europe began experiencing the outage at around 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) Thursday, according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker that said as many as 61,000 user reports to the site were made.

SpaceX's Starlink suffered one of its biggest international outages on Thursday when an internal  software failure knocked tens of thousands of users offline, a rare disruption for Elon Musk's powerful satellite internet system.