"Down across the entire front": Temporary Starlink outage affects Ukraine

Starlink temporarily failed again on Monday, with complaints also coming from Ukraine, where the satellite internet did not work "on the whole front". The news agency Reuters reports that the US space company SpaceX, which is responsible, has admitted to the temporary disruption. However, the note "Starlink is currently experiencing an outage, our team is investigating the incident" has already disappeared from the website. The problems were made public by the head of the Ukrainian drone forces, among others, and connections were possible again after around half an hour. Robert Brovdi also pointed out that this was not the first such failure.

Not the first failure

Ukraine is particularly reliant on Starlink in its defence against the Russian war of aggression; according to the Kyiv Independent, the satellite internet has replaced a large part of the communications infrastructure that was destroyed by the fighting. Not only the country's troops are dependent on the functioning of the technology, but also hospitals, schools and other facilities communicate via it. In total, Ukraine has received more than 50,000 additional Starlink antennas since the first ones shortly after the Russian invasion in early 2022, more than half of which were provided by Poland.

This Monday's brief outage is the second in just a few months for Starlink; at the end of July, the service was offline for two and a half hours. At that time, the problem affected large parts of the world, at least in Europe and North America. The last outage was blamed on a software issue that occurred in Starlink's core network. A Starlink manager apologized and promised to get to the bottom of the cause so that this would not happen again. It is unclear what is behind the new outage. The US company did not respond to an inquiry from Reuters.

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(mho)