T-Mobile is apologizing for a major nationwide outage on Monday that left many T-Mobile customers across the U.S. without any mobile service for hours.
While we don’t yet have an answer on what caused the T-Mobile outage, another question remains: Where was T-Mobile’s Starlink service, T-Satellite?
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What is T-Satellite?
Way back in 2022, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and T-Mobile announced an exclusive partnership between the two companies that would allow T-Mobile customers to connect to Starlink satellites. T-Mobile finally launched the T-Satellite service for customers last summer, following a testing period at the start of the year.
“T-Satellite connects you where towers can’t,” reads T-Mobile’s T-Satellite with Starlink product page on its website.
In a recent earnings call last Thursday, just days before the outage, T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan even shared that satellite service won’t so much compete with traditional mobile carrier offerings, but be offered as complementary alongside cellular service.
Yet, when cellular service went down on Monday, some users reported online that they struggled to connect to T-Satellite.
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“Why didn’t their phones switch to T-Satellite network with Starlink?” asked one social media user in response to Mashable’s coverage of the T-Mobile outage.
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“T-Mobile is down, but what I find funny is that they brag about having satellite and you connect automatically when you can’t get service from t-mobile, but satellite doesn’t connect either,” said one user on Musk’s social media platform X alongside a crying face emoji.
“My T-Satellite aka Starlink didn’t connect, what happened I thought it was supposed to be amazing for exactly this????” complained an X user. Another X user shared, “Mine tried and could not find a sat lol not kidding.”
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One crucial issue users may have faced: Starlink connectivity requires a wide, clear view of the open sky. So, while Starlink connections may be available in most urban areas, objects such as roofs, poles, and even trees can obstruct signal strength. This could explain why some customers struggled to connect via satellite while their phones were stuck in SOS Mode during the T-Mobile outage.
Mashable did come across users on X and Reddit who said they successfully connected to T-Satellite during the Monday outage.
T-Mobile’s T-Satellite with Starlink service is included at no extra cost on certain T-Mobile plans, such as the $100 per month Experience Beyond plan. If T-Satellite isn’t included in a user’s service plan, they can add it on for $10 per month.
Starlink’s partnership with T-Mobile hasn’t met expectations
Recent statements from T-Mobile CEO Gopalan suggest T-Satellite hasn’t been widely used by T-Mobile customers.
During an April 2026 earnings call, Gopalan called the company’s Starlink partnership “very strong” but admitted that T-Mobile was “seeing a lot less usage than we were originally thinking” regarding its T-Satellite service. Gopalan went on to call it “a great complementary product.”
At a conference the next month, in May 2026, Gopalan was more specific with just how low T-Satellite usage has been.
“Just to give you an example, we look at our data in May, and satellite usage is 0.0002% of our total network usage,” Gopalan said of its T-Satellite service. “That’s three zeros.”
In the previously mentioned earnings call from last week, Gopalan reiterated those numbers and added that “in our busiest summer months, that went to 0.0003%.” And, despite that small summer bump, independent data from Speedtest.net parent company Ookla found that T-Satellite usage has largely gone down.
During its launch last year, T-Mobile shared that 1.8 million customers had signed up for the T-Satellite free beta period. The company has not shared subscription numbers for the Starlink service since.
Mashable reached out to T-Mobile to find out more about T-Satellite service and Monday’s nationwide outage. We will update this piece if we receive more information.
Source: https://mashable.com/tech/t-satellite-starlink-t-mobile-network-outage
