On Thursday, a global outage of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service disrupted communications for Ukrainian forces, who depend heavily on the system for coordinating battlefield operations. The outage, which began around 3:13 p.m. ET (7:13 p.m. GMT), lasted approximately two and a half hours.
“Connectivity has been fully reestablished along the entire front line,” confirmed Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, in a Telegram message early Friday.
Starlink, operated by Musk’s aerospace firm SpaceX, has played a vital role in Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression, with over 40,000 terminals used by the military and infrastructure teams.
Musk addressed the outage via his platform X, apologizing and promising a quick resolution. “SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” he wrote.
Despite past clashes with Ukrainian officials—including criticisms of President Volodymyr Zelensky and calls for negotiations with Moscow—Musk has pledged to keep Starlink active for Ukrainian troops. “No matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals,” he said earlier this year.
