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Global Starlink Failure Temporarily Shuts Down Ukraine’s Military Comms
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![Photo of Roman Kohanets]( "Photo of Roman Kohanets")
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A rare global outage of SpaceX Starlink satellite network on July 24 disrupted critical military communications in Ukraine, including systems supporting its extensive unmanned aerial operations across the front, as was reported by the Reuters on July 25.
Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, acknowledged the incident on X, stating: “Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours. The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”
Robert Brovdi, Commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces of Ukraine, confirmed the scale of the impact “Combat missions continued without live feeds; reconnaissance was carried out using strike platforms,” he noted. “This 150-minute incident — an eternity in wartime — exposed critical vulnerabilities. We must account for these and diversify our communications.”
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The Starlink network, which comprises over 6,000 satellites and serves more than 3 million users globally, has been a cornerstone of Ukraine’s communications and reconnaissance capabilities since the early stages of Russia’s full-scale invasion. According to Reuters, this incident marks one of the most significant outages in the system’s operational history.
While SpaceX has not released detailed technical information about the failure, the company stated that preventive actions have been taken to avoid future disruptions. Previous episodes — including limitations on Starlink’s use in certain combat zones — have highlighted ongoing concerns about the military dependence on a commercially operated satellite service.
Earlier, it was reported that Denmark will provide satellite services to Ukraine through the European Defense Agency, as announced by Ukraine’s Defense Minister.
