After a Year of Promises, Starlink Customer Support Is Still Terrible

Got a problem with Starlink? Don’t be surprised if you encounter a long wait via SpaceX’s customer support channel. 

A year ago, SpaceX said it would shore up the customer support for its satellite internet service following complaints. But users say slow response times persist, forcing some customers to wait weeks for a solution while sometimes receiving unhelpful, automated replies. 

“You can never talk to anyone, it is all done by messaging,” says Starlink subscriber April Vaught, who resorted to fixing the issue on her own by canceling her account, factory-resetting the Starlink hardware, and then starting a new account.

Starlink’s customer support took five days to reply to her with a useless automated message. “I feel they need to be better. The service is pricey, the least they could do is offer better customer support,” she says.

So cool. And do you think you can add customer support to Starlink for those of us earthlings? pic.twitter.com/uVXte5psiQ(Opens in a new window)

— John Miles (@johnmiles1970) March 10, 2023(Opens in a new window)

You can find similar complaints on Facebook(Opens in a new window), Reddit(Opens in a new window) and Twitter(Opens in a new window), some of which will claim Starlink has the “worst customer service ever.(Opens in a new window)”

The issue can be particularly maddening for users who received their Starlink dish hardware, only to encounter errors when setting it up. Subscribers have no way to call SpaceX, all they can do is send a support ticket through the company’s website or app. 

“I wish more people knew how awful the human element is there,” says Joseph Browning, a former Starlink subscriber. Although Browning says Starlink’s internet service is “awesome,” he was forced to cancel after the company’s customer support failed to restore access after he paused his subscription.

“I get that it’s a new company and all that, but really I have not gotten a single coherent response from them on how to fix the problem,” he adds. 

(Credit: John Gianopulos)

Another subscriber named John Gianopulos tells PCMag the customer support was bad enough that he canceled his Starlink plan after the service mysteriously went out. “I’m not alone on this feeling, either. Reddit has plenty of other folks(Opens in a new window) stating the same thing,” he says. “The running joke on Reddit is that Starlink is officially a crappy ISP.”

The problems can be so infuriating that at least a few customers have resorted to reaching out to the Federal Communications Commission, the US regulator that oversees Starlink. 

“I contacted FCC because I received no reply on my Starlink support ticket for >3 weeks regarding the intermittent service,” says one Reddit user, who declined to give out his full name.

“After filing the FCC complaint, I received a message from them that my request was forwarded to the provider,” the user says. “The next day I received a notification from Starlink that the replacement kit containing the dish, cable and router was sent to me.” The FCC then later sent a follow-up email(Opens in a new window) confirming Starlink had responded to the original problem. 

We reached out to SpaceX, along with a dozen Starlink customer support representatives, to better understand why the response times can be so slow, but no one responded.

(Photo Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

It’s possible the company is still trying to expand customer support amid a flood of new users. In December, Starlink announced it had reached 1 million active subscribers, up from 140,000 13 months earlier. It’s also important to point out that other users have reported fast(Opens in a new window) response times and positive experiences(Opens in a new window) with Starlink customer support, including offering free shipments of new cables and hardware.  

Scott Blackburn, a Starlink user based in Peru, also says SpaceX usually does respond and try to resolve the customer support tickets—it just takes time. He’s a moderator for a Starlink Facebook group, and had to wait almost six weeks before the company’s customer support finally resolved a location-related issue that prevented him from going online.

During that nearly six-week period, Blackburn noticed that customer support would automatically assume the nature of the problem and send replacement cables or hardware, suggesting SpaceX may not be thoroughly reading customer support tickets. But during the wait, he also received several phone calls from Starlink customer support agents trying to help. They finally resolved the error and he was compensated with two months of free service.

“It wasn’t so much frustrating customer service, it was frustrating waiting for the response and the timing,” he says. “It’s terrible at first, but good when they finally contact you.

“When you’re relying on an American or Canadian company, you want the live customer service, and [Starlink] is just not that,” he adds. “You’re just going to have to be patient. They are still new and growing.”

The FCC declined to comment on the slow response times from Starlink’s customer support, but it says: “Our general practice is that informal consumer complaints submitted through the Commission’s consumer complaint portal are served on the company. The provider has 30 days to respond in writing to the consumer and the Commission. This process provides consumers with an efficient way to raise issues with their provider.”

So users desperate to fix a problem can consider contacting the FCC’s consumer complaint(Opens in a new window) channel. Other resources include checking out Reddit(Opens in a new window) and Facebook(Opens in a new window) pages devoted to Starlink for potential solutions.