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.

SpaceX's Starlink satellite network was back up and running on Friday as engineers hunted for the root cause of one of its biggest international outages the night before, a rare disruption for the powerful internet system set off by an internal software failure.

Starlink appears to have largely recovered from a widespread outage on Thursday afternoon that affected its services across the United States and other parts of the world. Reports of service disruptions flooded outage tracker Down Detector earlier in the afternoon, with users experiencing internet outages and, in some cases, total blackouts.