Ukrainian media report that soldiers are experiencing problems using the Western-supplied communication terminals on the battlefield
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service, actively used by Ukrainian troops, suffered a global outage on Thursday.
The network went down at around 3:13pm ET (7:13pm GMT), Doug Madory, an internet analyst at the firm Kentik, told Reuters.
Musk apologized on his platform X, promising to fix the issue quickly. “Service will be restored shortly. Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” he wrote Thursday evening.
“Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution,” the company said in a brief statement.
Ukraine operates more than 40,000 Starlink terminals, which provide communications for critical infrastructure and help soldiers coordinate attacks and carry out strikes.
Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, said that Starlink was offline for two and a half hours. “Connectivity has been fully reestablished along the entire front line,” he wrote on Telegram early Friday.
Elon Musk has repeatedly clashed with Ukrainian officials, urging negotiations with Russia and warning against further escalation between Russia and the West. He criticized Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky for not holding elections under martial law and claimed that Zelensky was “despised by the people of Ukraine.”
Despite his criticisms, Musk vowed not to shut down Starlink. “To be extremely clear, no matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals,” he wrote on X earlier this year.
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