" allows customers to access the internet with just a receiver,"

Er, how do you tell the system what you want to receive?

Or is this a case of downloading the whole internet onto one floppy disk?

It won't fit on a floppy - it fits nicely in a 1550 diecast box with a flashing red light on the top.

Beat me to it...although nowadays I think you can compress assorted clouds into a tank you can wear on your back.

1550 diecast box with a flashing red light on the top.

With [1]a lot of caching ?

[1] https://xkcd.com/908/

I knew what boxes and diecasting were.

However, since looking up "1550 diecast box", I've been stunned to read that the boxes have been "casted".

Who can I blame? They should have been cast away before this could happen!

According to this it was plastic…

https://theitcrowd.fandom.com/wiki/The_Internet

"The ITY Crowd" Season 3, Episode 4

Jen: [Moss has a small plastic box with a flashing light] What is it?

Moss: This, Jen, is the Internet.

Jen: What?

Moss: That's right.

Jen: This is the Internet? The whole Internet?

Moss: Yep. I asked for a loan of it so that you could use it in your speech.

Jen: It's so small.

Moss: That's one of the surprising things about it.

Jen: Hang on, it doesn't have any wires or anything.

Moss: It's wireless.

Maybe it's like ye olde Ceefax/Teletext and it cycles through the whole internet, you just have to wait until the bit you want comes around. Or maybe, and I'm just throwing this out as a possibility, the writer is an idiot.

'you just have to wait until the bit you want comes around'

Just like Alice's Restaurant then.

Here it comes ...

I remember systems were you made requests using dial-up and then satellite beamed you the response (and of course everyone with the receiver could intercept it).

The original DirecPC antenna was just a receiver. Must be the same tech. It could fill your HD cache with web page it thought you might like.

The return path was a phone line.

The next batch of satellites will form a new constellation to jam all the other constellations. That in turn will cause yet another constellation to be created to jam the jamming constellation from jamming the first constellation. And then, when yet another constellation for jamming the jamming of the jamming constellation was being created and, boom, the Kessler syndrome hit and we got jammed and ended up in with a pickle.

Look for a flying Winnebago - prepare to be... jammed!

Spaceballs 2 is expected to be released in 2027, so lots of time to prepare!

Mine showed network issues from 0527 - 0542 BST this morning.

Anon, 'cos well... I'm paying money to herr musk.

El Reg failed to include the photo of Doofusführer Musk pointing to where his non-working satellites were in the article.

Reg missed a snarky opportunity:

"The outage was brief. According to Downdetector.com, approximately 40,000 users who have a secondary method of Internet access reported problems early this morning. The remaining 5,960,000 customers, whose only Internet connection is via Starlink, were unable to make a report to Downdector at all. Most of them were busy checking their kit to see if the problem was local to their network."

Seriously... Let's say a measly 5% of Starlink's estimated 6M customers did some troubleshooting, I did. That is 300k people. I spent about 20 minutes doing the usual network pings to make sure it wasn't one of my switches, rebooted stuff, etc. That math works out to 6M minutes, or 100k hours or wasted time. Most people work around 2k hours/year for around 50 years, to reach 100k hours of work over their entire lifetime.

What makes Starlink different from other Telco's and ISPs? It seems rare that all of AT&T or all of Centurylink will go down at once. However, when Starlink goes down, it seems to take the entire planet with it. It seems unlikely that all of Starlink's data flows through a single point of failure, or even a single data center for that matter. Therefore the only thing that comes to mind is their software.

If there was a defect in the software, then it seems unlikely the problem could be found, patched, tested, and uploaded within minutes. That leads me to think these occasional short global outages (fractions of an hour) may be intentional - deploy the patch and reboot everything. Simply take the outage hit rather than a progressive update with hours/days of degraded service. Starlink does work 'outside the box' of traditional thinking, this could be their standard operating procedure for updates.

Maybe I am over thinking the situation. It would be interesting to hear what other tech minds think could be a single point of failure in Starlink that could cause global outages.

Yeah, that was exactly the question I had in mind. If they are Starlink customers and Starlink is down, how can they report an outage ? Over their smartphones ?

But if they have Internet access over their smartphones, why do they need Starlink ?

Does one get an SLA with starlink service? It isn't regulated for availability etc like old fashioned telephone service was AFAIK.

So fuck it, Move Fast and Break Things(TM).

In one drug fuelled, fascist, basket case.

At least in the northern USA the outage seems to have coincided with increased geomagnetic activity.

Yeah, depending on satellites in LEO might not seem like a great idea the next time we get a Carrington Event. To be fair, though, a lot of other systems are going to switch rapidly to "on fire" mode when that happens. At the moment, we don't have enough baseline data to know, directly, how frequent they are, but IIRC, ice cores can give a proxy, and I think we're overdue.