Global Starlink outage disrupts Ukrainian front lines
Starlink, the satellite internet service owned by Elon Musk, experienced a global outage on July 24, the company announced on its official website.
The extent and duration of the disruption remain unclear, and officials have yet to provide details on what caused the service interruption.
The Ukrainian military confirmed the outage on Telegram, stating that Starlink terminals were down and connectivity was lost along the front lines.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine depend on Starlink satellites, which have replaced internet networks damaged during the war. Civilians in hospitals, schools, and frontline areas all rely on it — as does the military along the entire front.
While details about the cause of the outage have not been disclosed, Ukraine's access to Starlink has been a recurring point of tension throughout the full-scale invasion, especially in the context of Kyiv's relationship with the United States and Starlink owner Elon Musk.
Starlink's Vice President of Engineering, Michael Nicolls, announced on X that the network had "mostly recovered" by 6:23 p.m. ET after an approximately 2.5-hour outage. Nicolls attributed the disruption to "failure of key internal software services that operate the core network," adding that the company is "deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again."
