Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service experienced a global outage early Monday morning, affecting tens of thousands of users spanning from the U.S. to the battlefields of Ukraine.
Starlink is an internet service provider created by Musk and operated by his company SpaceX. It uses low orbit satellites around Earth to connect and deliver internet to remote areas throughout the world. This also includes worldwide military conflict areas, such as Ukraine. According to multiple reports, Starlink has about six million subscribers around the world.
“Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage,” read a message on its website on Monday morning. “Our team is investigating.”
The outage significantly affected Ukrainian forces fighting against Russia, Reuters reported. Internet services ceased to operate at approximately 7:30 a.m. in Kyiv, Ukraine. Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s unmanned systems force, acknowledged the outage in a post on the messaging app Telegram.
“Another global outage at SpaceX,” Brovdi wrote.
With over 50,000 terminals used by the country in its conflict with Russia, Starlink is an integral part of Ukrainian communication during the war, used for communications among military units and drone operations, according to reports. It is the second such outage Ukraine has experienced with Starlink since July, when services were disabled for over two hours.
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“This incident, which lasted a long 150 minutes in the war, points to bottlenecks,” Brovidi said, while expressing his frustrations at the time. “Should be taken into account and to diversify communications.”
In the U.S., over 37,000 users started having difficulties using their services as of 12:30 a.m., CNN reported. An hour later, the issue seemed to have been resolved and connectivity was restored for most users in the country.