Musk's Starlink hit with hourslong outage
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Starlink, owned by Elon Musk, has changed the game in terms of internet accessibility in rural and other underserved areas lacking high-speed broadband infrastructure. It has 2 million US subscribers, and more than 6 million globally.
The website Down Detector recorded a spike in Starlink user error reports beginning around 3 p.m., with error reports peaking around 3:30 p.m. As of this writing, the number of reports had dropped, but they were still significantly higher than the hours prior to the incident.
According to The Kyiv Independent, the outage affected Ukrainian troops who rely on Starlink terminals, citing a Telegram message from the military saying Starlink is down across the entire front. The military now says its connections are back online after going down for about 150 minutes, “the longest in the war.”
Reports of service disruptions flooded outage tracker DownDetector, with users experiencing internet outages and, in some cases, total blackouts. Starlink and its founder, Elon Musk, confirmed the outage and said they were investigating the issue.
Tens of thousands of people across the world reported issues with Starlink on Thursday, according to Downdetector. Starlink confirmed it was experiencing a network outage and said it has "mostly recovered from the network outage."
On Friday, Reuters reported that Musk ordered SpaceX staff to cut off Starlink during a 2022 Ukrainian counteroffensive. The move, which left Ukrainian troops without communications access, raises ongoing concerns that the world’s richest man might use his control over the service to influence political and military outcomes.
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The New Voice of Ukraine on MSNGlobal Starlink failure cuts off Ukraine’s battlefield commsThe outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” he wrote. “We apologize for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network,