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Ukrainian military Starlink systems were down for two and a half hours overnight, a senior commander confirmed, as part of a global disruption to the satellite internet provider.
Ukraine‘s forces heavily rely on thousands of SpaceX‘s Starlink terminals for battlefield communications and drone operations, proving resistant to espionage and signal jamming throughout three and a half years of fighting Russia‘s invasion.
Starlink’s biggest international outage on Thursday, caused by 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.
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An antenna of the Starlink satellite-based broadband system donated by Elon Musk in Izyum, Kharkiv region on 25 September, 2022, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Getty Images)
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.
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Elon Musk looks on during a news conference with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on May 30, 2025 (AFP/Getty)
Oleksandr Dmitriev, the founder of OCHI, a Ukrainian system that centralises feeds from thousands of drone crews across the frontline, told Reuters the outage showed that relying on cloud services to command units and relay battlefield drone reconnaissance was a “huge risk”.
“If connection to the internet is lost … the ability to conduct combat operations is practically gone,” he said, calling for a move towards local communication systems that are not reliant on the internet.
Although Starlink does not operate in Russia, Ukrainian officials have said that Moscow’s troops are also widely using the systems on the frontlines in Ukraine.
Elon Musk’s network apologised for the outage on Thursday night: “The network issue has been resolved, and Starlink service has been restored,” the company’s official X account wrote around 8.15 p.m. ET Thursday. “We understand how important connectivity is and apologize for the disruption.”
Musk reposted the message, having previously apologized for the outage personally and reassuring users that it would only be temporary. “SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” the tech billionaire wrote.