If yes, how?

Last update 11th of October 2024: There have been a dozen more reports with the same issue. Starlink is nearly unusable in Tehran now. The government almost certainly knows about this.

TL;DR: Some users are reporting frequent outages in the capital of Iran, where government is known to utilize GPS signal jammers. Starlink requires GPS, but has the option to use its own positioning system exclusively. However, this made no difference. Recent updates are also suspected to have affected this, but nothing is confirmed overall.

Around 10 months ago, I made a post regarding reoccurring hours-long outages when using Starlink in Iran, and how Starlink app didn't seem to properly report these outages. Regardless, the issue seemed to have disappeared after a few weeks and everything went back to normal... until now.

During that time, Starlink app has been updated to show ping success rate in the statistics page, and Starlink usage has become slightly more widespread across Iran. There are small group related to Starlink discussions. A few days ago, some people started reporting heavy disruptions similar to the ones seen in my previous post:

These outages occur in seemingly random hours. During them, Starlink internet becomes nearly unusable for most use cases due to the sheer amount of timeouts and slow speeds.

Not everyone inside Iran reported experiencing these outages. The ones who did however, all had one thing in common: They were all located in Tehran (the capital city of Iran)

The Iranian government has long been using signal jammers in this region, especially when political tensions were high (and right now they are). GPS has usually been unreliable in this regions as a result.

Starlink relies on GPS to work, and as it happens, Starlink app sometimes shows the "Determining Location" message when these outages occur:

This lead us to believe that GPS disruptions were also indirectly affecting Starlink, as the satellites were unable to locate the dish properly.

Fortunately, Starlink has the option to use its own positioning system instead:

However... this did not make any difference. Outages were still occurring even when this option was enabled.

Someone contacted Starlink support and they claimed slow speeds were caused by an update. During the past few updates, Starlink app has been slow and unresponsive whenever the dish was connected, so we're not sure if this is related. We also tried changing tilt and factory resetting, but to no avail.

So far, these outages have been reported by 3 separate people in a Telegram group [Edit: I got a Reddit message from someone else with the same issue. They're also located in Tehran]. There are dozens of people reporting the same issue in Telegram groups and even reddit. Starlink still works perfectly fine outside of these hours, making the possibility of hardware defects even less likely.

In the end, we're not sure about the real cause, but the most logical explanation has something to do with Starlink's positioning not being functional. This has never been reported anywhere else so I thought to share it here.