Starlink, owned by Elon Musk, has changed the game in terms of internet accessibility in rural and other underserved areas lacking high-speed broadband infrastructure. It has 2 million US subscribers, and more than 6 million globally.

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.

The launch is the first of two Starlink missions planned for the day. SpaceX has scheduled a second launch with 24 satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 8:55 p.m. PDT local (11:55 p.m. EDT or 0355 GMT on July 27).

Tens of thousands of people across the world reported issues with Starlink on Thursday, according to Downdetector. Starlink confirmed it was experiencing a network outage and said it has "mostly recovered from the network outage."