Starlink, the satellite arm of Elon Musk's SpaceX, has warned of a "degraded service" as the earth is battered by the biggest geomagnetic storm due to solar activity in two decades.
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Starlink owns about 60 per cent of the roughly 7500 satellites orbiting earth and is a dominant player in satellite internet.
Billionaire entrepreneur Musk said earlier on Saturday in a post on X that Starlink satellites were under a lot of pressure due to the geomagnetic storm, but were holding up so far.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said the storm is the biggest since October 2003 and was likely to persist across the weekend, posing risks to navigation systems, power grids, and satellite navigation, among other services.
The thousands of Starlink satellites in low-earth orbit use inter-satellite laser links to pass data between one another in space at the speed of light, allowing the network to offer internet coverage around the world.
Australian Associated Press