Ukraine Says Starlink’s Global Outage Hit Its Military Communications
Starlink systems used by Ukrainian military units were down for two and a half hours overnight, a senior commander said, part of a global issue that disrupted the satellite internet provider.
Ukraine’s forces are heavily reliant on thousands of SpaceX’s Starlink terminals for battlefield communications and some drone operations, as they have proved resistant to espionage and signal jamming throughout the three and a half years of fighting Russia’s invasion.
Starlink experienced one of its biggest international outages on Thursday when an internal software failure knocked tens of thousands of users offline.
“Starlink is down across the entire front,” Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, wrote on Telegram at 10:41 p.m. (1941 GMT) on Thursday.
He updated his post later to say that by about 1:05 a.m. on Friday the issue had been resolved. He said the incident had highlighted the risk of reliance on the systems, and called for communication and connectivity methods to be diversified.
“Combat missions were performed without a (video) feed, battlefield reconnaissance was done with strike (drones),” Brovdi wrote.
