Starlink Not Working — Dish, Obstruction & Connection Fixes

Applies to: Starlink residential satellite internet, all dish generations

Starlink troubleshooting looks nothing like cable or fiber, because the connection depends on a clear view of the sky rather than a physical line. The app's status label is your starting point for almost everything below.

1. Check the app's status label before anything else

• Obstructed: something is physically blocking the dish's view of the sky. See the obstruction section below.
• Searching: the dish lost its lock on a satellite and is trying to reacquire one — often resolves on its own within a minute or two.
• No Satellites: briefly normal, especially at the edge of coverage; frequent occurrences are worth noting if they keep happening.
• Network Issue / Outage: confirmed as Starlink's problem, not yours — nothing to troubleshoot locally.
• Offline — Booting: normal after a power-on or reboot; give it 5-20 minutes before assuming something's wrong.

2. App shows "Disconnected" but the dish seems fine

This confuses a lot of people, and it's usually not what it sounds like. "Disconnected" in the app often just means your phone can't reach the dish's local management system — not that the whole system is broken.

1. Make sure your phone is actually connected to the Starlink WiFi network, not your cellular data, before opening the app.
2. If your account session expired, sign out of the app and back in.
3. If it's still showing disconnected after both, check the physical cable between the dish and the router for damage — see the next section.

3. Check the cable, especially where it enters the building

The dish's cable is a more common failure point than people expect, particularly at the connector on the dish end, which is exposed to weather.

• Look for kinks or bends sharper than about an 8-inch radius.
• Check for crush points — routed under a door, pinched somewhere — and any signs of animal damage.
• Inspect the connector itself at both ends for looseness or corrosion, especially where the cable enters the building.

4. Handle obstructions specifically

1. Use the Starlink app's obstruction map (or the 3D sky scanner in newer app versions) to see exactly which direction is blocked.
2. A tree branch, roofline, or chimney clipping even a small part of the dish's view causes short, repeating dropouts — not necessarily a constant outage.
3. Repositioning the dish, even slightly, often resolves obstructions that seem minor but happen to fall in the dish's active scan path.

5. Dish overheating in direct sun

On a hot day, a dish in direct sunlight can throttle performance or temporarily shut down to cool itself. Shading the dish or improving airflow around it resolves this if it lines up with hot, sunny conditions specifically.

6. Slow speeds specifically in the evening

If speeds are fine most of the day but consistently slow at peak evening hours, that's network congestion in your area's Starlink cell — a known pattern, not something wrong with your equipment. There's no user-side fix beyond upgrading to a priority service tier if this is a persistent problem for you.

7. Stow and unstow the dish

If nothing above resolves it, this forces a fuller reset of the dish's positioning system than a basic reboot does:

1. Open the Starlink app → Settings → Stow Starlink.
2. Wait for the dish to lay flat — about 30 seconds.
3. Go back to Settings and tap Unstow.

8. A short drop at the same time every night

Starlink installs firmware updates that briefly restart the dish, usually overnight. A consistent, short drop at roughly the same time each night is very likely this, not a fault worth troubleshooting further.

FAQ