[Starlink] Re: Multiday connectivity issues in Kenya.

[Inemesit Affia <inemesitaffia@gmail.com>]

Thanks for your insight Ben.

I believe a VPN may help your users (has its own issues).

One of the issues with diagnosing these issues generally is a lack of an eye from the inside. Running an RIPE Atlas and/or Globalping probe would help.

Of course SpaceX staff would have better tools.

Ciao

Jul 13, 2026 8:30:30 AM Ben Eastvold via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>:

> Confirming this from Nakuru County, Kenya, with data. I run a residential
> technology training program on Starlink (sole connectivity, ~20 students),
> and we have had this exact issue for 5+ days, surviving a dish firmware
> update (~July 8) and full power cycles of dish and router.
> 
> Symptoms: specific destination prefixes are blackholed or unstable while
> everything else performs excellently (100+ Mbps down, ~23ms latency).
> Affected destinations include Fastly and Akamai ranges, including
> https://www.google.com/url?q=http://starlink.com&source=gmail&ust=1784012243268000&sa=E
> itself. The affected set shifts over time -- sites work for a period, then
> fail.
> 
> TCP connect tests (curl, port 443), same terminal, same minute, against
> https://www.google.com/url?q=http://bbc.com&source=gmail&ust=1784012243268000&sa=E's
> four published Fastly addresses:
> 
> 151.101.0.81 -- TIMEOUT, no TCP handshake (8s)
> 151.101.64.81 -- TIMEOUT, no TCP handshake (8s)
> 151.101.128.81 -- connected 0.28s, HTTP 301
> 151.101.192.81 -- connected 0.30s, HTTP 301
> 
> Minutes later, all four of
> https://www.google.com/url?q=http://starlink.com&source=gmail&ust=1784012243268000&sa=E's
> addresses (151.101.1.143, 151.101.65.143, 151.101.129.143, 151.101.193.143)
> timed out with no handshake -- including addresses in the same ranges that
> had just worked for
> https://www.google.com/url?q=http://bbc.com&source=gmail&ust=1784012243268000&sa=E.
> The reachable prefix set is moving under our feet, which reads as route
> instability rather than a static misroute.
> 
> Akamai similarly affected:
> https://www.google.com/url?q=http://ichef.bbci.co.uk&source=gmail&ust=1784012243268000&sa=E
> (23.56.162.175) fails TCP entirely, so BBC pages currently render text
> without images.
> 
> Traceroutes: local hops (terminal -> 100.64.0.1 -> SpaceX 206.224.x) are
> consistently healthy at 20-30ms. Traffic then enters Liquid Telecom and
> takes inconsistent paths to the same destination set -- some traces via
> Johannesburg (lza-p2-tdn, lza-p3-jhb hops), one via Marseille
> (lfr-p1/p2-mrs), with latency spiking 80-265ms and heavy loss beyond hop 7.
> A trace toward the Akamai destination exits via a different upstream (
> https://www.google.com/url?q=http://twelve99.net/Arelion&source=gmail&ust=1784012243268000&sa=E)
> and dies similarly, so this spans multiple transit paths out of the Kenya
> gateway, not a single peer.
> 
> Full timestamped traceroute and curl output available if useful, and I can
> run tests on demand from this terminal. Ticket filed with Starlink support
> (maintained via workaround, since their portal is unreachable from the
> affected connection).
> 
> Ben Eastvold
> GLAD Technology, Nakuru County, Kenya
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