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.

Elon Musk issued a statement following a major global outage that knocked thousands of Starlink users offline late Thursday.

Company says 2.5-hour disruption of high-speed internet service was due to ‘failure’ of internal software services.

Caused by a rare internal software glitch, the outage disrupted critical communications, including Ukraine's military operations. Musk and SpaceX have promised corrective action and assured users the issue won't be repeated.

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.

Starlink is a satellite internet constellation that works as an international telecommunication provider, part of the American aerospace company SpaceX, founded by controversial billionaire Elon Musk. The network provides coverage to around 130 countries and territories, aiming to provide global mobile broadband.

After facing a global outage for nearly 3 hours, Starlink announced on Friday that the network issue affecting its internet service has been resolved.

T-Mobile's T-Satellite service, powered by Elon Musk's Starlink, could backfire once a speculated 12-month exclusivity deal ends.