IT-Mobile apologizes for a major nationwide outage on Monday that left many T-Mobile customers across the US without any cell service for hours.
While we still don’t have an answer to what caused the T-Mobile outage, one question remains: Where was T-Mobile’s Starlink service, T-Satellite?
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What is T-Satellite?
Back in 2022, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and T-Mobile announced an exclusive partnership between the two companies that will allow T-Mobile customers to connect to Starlink satellites. IT-Mobile finally launched the program Satellite customer service last summer, following a test time at the beginning of the year.
“Satellite connects you where towers can’t,” reads T-Mobile’s T-Satellite with Starlink. product page on its website.
On the latest earnings call last Thursday, just days before the outage, T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan said shared that satellite service will not compete strongly with traditional carrier offerings, but will be offered as a complement to cellular service.
However, when cellphone service went down on Monday, some users reported online that they were having trouble connecting to T-Satellite.
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“Why didn’t their phones switch to the T-Satellite and Starlink network?” it asked one social media user responding to Mashable’s report about the T-Mobile outage.
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“IT-Mobile is down, but what I find funny is that they brag about having satellite and you automatically connect when you can’t get service on t-mobile, but satellite doesn’t connect,” said one user on Musk X’s social media next to a crying face emoji.
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“My satellite called Starlink didn’t communicate, what happened I thought it must be a miracle this time ????” he complained X user. Another X user shared“I tried and he didn’t get sat lol not playing.”
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One important problem that users may face: Starlink communications require a wide, clear view of the open sky. Therefore, although Starlink communications may be available in most urban areas, objects such as roofs, poles, and even trees can block signal strength. This could explain why some customers are struggling to connect to satellite while their phones are stuck in SOS mode during a T-Mobile shutdown.
Mashable reached out to users on X and Reddit who said they successfully connected to T-Satellite during Monday’s shutdown.
T-Mobile 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 is not included in the user’s service plan, they can add it for $10 per month.
Starlink’s partnership with T-Mobile has not lived up to expectations
Recent statements from T-Mobile CEO Gopalan suggest that T-Satellite is not yet widely used by T-Mobile customers.
during the Salary for April 2026 callGopalan called the company’s Starlink relationship “very strong” but acknowledged that T-Mobile is “seeing much less usage than we originally thought” for its T-Satellite service. Gopalan went on to call it “a great complementary product.”
At the conference next month, in May 2026, Gopalan was more precise low consumption of T-Satellite it’s been
“Just to give you an example, we look at our data for May, and satellite usage is 0.0002% of our total network usage,” Gopalan said of his T-Satellite service. “That’s three zeros.”
In the aforementioned earnings call, Gopalan he repeated those numbers and added that “in our busiest summer months, that came to 0.0003%. And, despite that small summer bump, independent data from Speedtest.net’s parent company Ookla found that T-Satellite usage has dropped significantly.
At launch last year, T-Mobile shared that 1.8 million customers signed up for the free beta period of T-Satellite. The company has not shared the subscription numbers of the Starlink service since then.
Mashable reached out to T-Mobile to find out more about T-Satellite service and Monday’s nationwide outage. We will update this piece when we get more information.