Starlink Freezes New Sign-Ups in Seven Kenyan Counties as Network Fills Up

Starlink has stopped accepting new customers in seven Kenyan counties. If you live in Nairobi, Kiambu, Mombasa, Machakos, Murang’a, Kirinyaga or Kwale and you try to order the service today, the website will not let you finish the purchase. It puts you on a waiting list instead.

The notice on Starlink’s site is direct. It tells anyone trying to sign up that the service is at capacity in their area, then offers the option to pay a deposit and reserve a place on a waitlist. The company says it cannot give an estimated timeframe for when new orders will reopen, only that its teams are working to add capacity.

This is not the first time. We covered the same thing in November 2024, when Starlink froze new sign-ups across Nairobi and neighbouring counties after demand overwhelmed the network. That freeze lasted about seven months and only lifted in June 2025. During it, Starlink lost customers rather than gained them, and slipped from seventh to eighth on the list of the country’s largest internet providers while rivals mopped up the demand it could not serve.

Two things are different this time. The first is that the freeze has reached the coast. The 2024 pause was centred on Nairobi and the counties around it. The current list adds Mombasa and Kwale, Kenya’s main coastal hubs, along with Kirinyaga in central Kenya. The congestion is no longer a Nairobi-only problem.

The second is the mechanism. In 2024, blocked customers simply saw a “sold out” tag and an option to be notified by email. Now the company is taking deposits to reserve a spot in a queue, which locks in that demand and gives Starlink a clearer picture of how many people are waiting.

Why an internet service can “sell out”

This is the part that surprises people. With fibre, a provider adds capacity by laying more cable and installing more equipment on the ground. It controls the whole chain from the exchange to your router. Satellite internet does not work that way.

Starlink beams its signal from thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit. Each satellite covers a fixed patch of ground at any moment, and everyone under that patch shares the bandwidth it can provide. When too many people in one area subscribe, the beam serving that area fills up. There is only so much data it can carry over Nairobi, or over Mombasa, at any one time.

To add capacity, Starlink has to put more satellites overhead, build more ground stations that route traffic to the wider internet, or stop signing up new users until the load eases. It cannot simply “lay more cable” the way a fibre operator does. That constraint is the whole reason a waitlist exists.

The demand that caused it

Starlink launched commercially in Kenya in July 2023. Its growth since then has been fast, and it has been driven almost entirely by price. The hardware kit that once cost about KES 89,000 now sells for KES 49,900, and customers can rent it for KES 1,950 a month instead of buying it outright. A 50GB monthly plan costs KES 1,300, which undercuts comparable mobile and fixed offers. We have tracked each of these cuts, including the recent drop in the upfront price of the smaller Starlink Mini.

The result shows up in the numbers. By the end of March 2026, Starlink had 24,999 subscribers in Kenya, according to the Communications Authority of Kenya. That is roughly triple the 8,063 it had in June 2024, and we reported when it crossed the 25,000 mark. It is still less than 1% of Kenya’s fixed internet market, where Safaricom leads with about a third of all connections. But it is one of the fastest growing providers on the list, and it accounts for almost all of the country’s satellite internet.

What comes next

Capacity is the recurring theme in Starlink’s Kenya story. After the first freeze, the company switched on a local ground station in Nairobi in early 2025. That cut latency from around 120 milliseconds to about 53, and eased the load enough to resume sign-ups. This new freeze suggests demand has once again caught up with what the network can carry.

Competition is building at the same time. Amazon has applied for a satellite internet licence in Kenya through its Project Kuiper service, and it is setting up its first African ground station in the country. Regulation is shifting too, with the Communications Authority replacing the old satellite licence with a far more expensive framework that could cost operators tens of millions of shillings.

For now, the practical situation is simple. If you are in any of the seven counties and you wanted Starlink, you cannot buy it today. You can join the waitlist and wait, with no promised date, or look at fibre and fixed wireless alternatives that are not capacity-constrained in the same way. How long the wait lasts depends on how quickly SpaceX can add capacity over Kenya, which is the one part of this that customers cannot see or control.