Musk’s Starlink outage affects tens of thousands, including Ukrainian military

By Lex Harvey and Svitlana Vlasova, CNN

(CNN) — A brief global outage of Elon Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink on Monday affected tens of thousands of people, including Ukrainian military forces across the entire frontline.

More than 37,000 US users were reporting issues with the internet service Monday at 12:30 a.m. ET, according to the website Downdetector.com. By 1:30 a.m., that number had fallen into the hundreds.

The internet service owned by Musk’s SpaceX stopped working on “the entire frontline in Ukraine” around 7:30 a.m. Kyiv time (12.30 a.m. ET), said Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s unmanned systems force, on Telegram. As of 8:00 a.m., service was gradually being restored, he said.

Starlink has more than 6 million global users, according to its website. It provides high-speed internet service using a network of thousands of satellites at low-Earth orbit, enabling it to reach remote communities.

Ukraine has relied on Starlink throughout Russia’s invasion to run its fleet of attack drones but has reported connectivity issues in the past.

Monday’s outage is the second in two months affecting the war-torn country. On July 24, Starlink went out for more than two hours; as a result, combat operations had to be carried out without live streams.

“This incident, which lasted a long 150 minutes in the war, points to bottlenecks. Should be taken into account and to diversify communications,” Brovdi said on Telegram at the time.

Starlink acknowledged the outage Monday in a post to its website, which has since been taken down, Reuters reported.

“Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage. Our team is investigating,” the notice said, according to Reuters. There was no immediate word about the cause of the outage.

CNN has reached out to Space X for comment.

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