Ukrainian soldiers cut off from Musk’s Starlink after blackout

 Soldiers on Ukraine’s front line suffered a communications blackout for more than two hours last night following a major outage on Elon Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink.

In a post on Telegram, the Ukrainian army said Starlink terminals were down across the front line, disrupting combat work and reconnaissance.

It added that the outage, which lasted for 150 minutes, was the longest in the war against Russia so far.

Starlink, which is part of Mr Musk’s SpaceX, provides satellite broadband services that beam down signals from space, helping to provide coverage in remote areas. It has played a crucial role in supporting Ukraine’s campaign.

Mr Musk initially provided Starlink terminals to Ukraine for free in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, though the Pentagon has since handed a contract to the company to ensure continued coverage.

In addition to its military use, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians also depend on the service, which has been deployed to restore internet connections in hospitals, schools, businesses and aid organisations.

In total, there are around 42,000 terminals in use across Ukraine.

Over-reliance fears

However, Ukraine’s dependence on Starlink has been a continued source of tension given the erratic nature of Mr Musk’s behaviour.

In March, the Tesla billionaire boasted that Starlink was the “backbone of the Ukrainian army”, adding: “Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.”

The comments fuelled concerns about Mr Musk’s influence over the war, especially after Donald Trump halted military aid and intelligence-sharing with Ukraine following a disastrous meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this year.

Mr Musk’s post also triggered a row with Poland, which pays for roughly half the active Starlink terminals in Ukraine at a cost of approximately $50m (£37m) a year.

Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, has said the country will look for alternative suppliers if Mr Musk proves to be unreliable.

OneWeb, the UK government-backed subsidiary of French satellite company Eutelsat, has said it is ready to “swiftly deploy” equipment in Ukraine if needed.

The Ukrainian army appeared to acknowledge its over-reliance on Starlink in the Telegram post, saying the outage showed there were “bottlenecks” and calling for the need to “diversify communication”.

Ukraine’s forces provided an update shortly before 1am stating that connectivity had been restored.

Michael Nicolls, Starlink’s head of engineering, wrote in a post on X: “Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours.

The outage was because of the failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.

“We apologise for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again.”

Mr Musk added: “Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.