Starlink proper died last last week!

I've had internet blackouts before, but those were usually caused by a complete power outage in the house - oh, the joys of living rurally during a stormy winter's night.

This outage, however, came at a really coincidental moment; I had just finished my Backblaze B2 to Cloudflare R2 migration, I shut down my computer, ready for some evening yoga, when my spouse suddenly shouted, "the internet is out!" - it really can't be, I was just using it.

But no, it really was out. In the time it took for me to log out of my server, close my browser, close the terminal and shut down the laptop, the internet had poofed.

The outage lasted a good couple of hours. By the time it reconnected, we were already asleep.

Another joy of living rurally is that, like fibre internet, roaming data doesn't exist here either. We either had no connection or H+; there was no in-between. We found ourselves reliving our teen years, convinced that height (which could only be achieved on tip-toes) was what stood between us and a solid connection.

All we were able to achieve was one of us loading a single Reddit thread and the other a single Hackernews thread where we took solace in knowing that we weren't alone; the best thing about an internet provider giving up on a global scale is the mass congregation of users finding a platform to have a moan, a bitch and laugh on.

Something I didn't anticipate was that the official method of communication for the outage was Twitter; I don't use Twitter, and I couldn't check the website because the entire globe hug of deathed it (whoops!).

But like - what the fuck? Communicate over email like a real company, guys! Come on!

I tried reaching out to a friend who also uses Starlink, but like us, they live in a blackspot for general phone signal. They didn't get my text until the following morning, after their Starlink dish reconnected to a satellite and my repeatedly failed SMS automatically sent itself over RCS instead.

I'm sure those who had a full working day in the middle of the outage found it to be incredibly infuriating and annoying, but it happened so late in the day (19:15 UTC) that it really wasn't an issue.

If Starlink could officially communicate over email next time, that would be great!