Blackout in Spain and Portugal Causes Starlink Popularity to Surge

The massive power outages that hit Spain and Portugal in late April exposed critical vulnerabilities in the country’s telecommunications infrastructure. The significant reduction in mobile coverage led to record growth in the use of Starlink satellite internet, despite its deterioration in quality under congestion.

According to the analytics company Ookla, a record number of users were recorded in Starlink networks on the day of the mass power outage in Spain and Portugal. On average, the increase in users in the two countries was 35% of the average.

As the publication notes, as a result of the blackout, most mobile towers were turned off. Only those equipped with backup generators continued to work. Then “thousands” of people switched to Starlink services. At the same time, according to Ookla, the satellite terminals of Elon Musk’s company also could not cope with the increased load and some of them eventually turned off. The quality of Starlink satellite communications in the two countries also decreased due to too many users on the network.

Red Eléctrica, the company that runs the Spanish power grid, said the exact cause of the outage was still unknown. Some experts speculate that the outage could have been due to an overload caused by unusually high levels of solar energy production that the grid was unable to cope with. However, there has been no official confirmation of this hypothesis.