Share this story KYIV — Starlink systems used by Ukrainian military units were down for two and a half hours overnight, a senior commander said, part of a global issue that disrupted the satellite internet provider. Ukraine’s forces are heavily reliant on thousands of SpaceX’s Starlink terminals for battlefield communications and some drone operations, as they have proved resistant to espionage and signal jamming throughout the three and a half years of fighting Russia’s invasion. ADVERTISING Starlink experienced one of its biggest international outages on Thursday when an internal software failure knocked tens of thousands of users offline. “Starlink is down across the entire front,” Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, wrote on Telegram at 10:41 p.m. (1941 GMT) on Thursday. Starlink, which has more than 6 million users across roughly 140 countries and territories, later acknowledged the global outage on its X account and said “we are actively implementing a solution.” Brovdi updated his post later to say that by about 1:05 a.m. on Friday the issue had been resolved. He said the incident had highlighted the risk of reliance on the systems, and called for communication and connectivity methods to be diversified. “Combat missions were performed without a (video) feed, battlefield reconnaissance was done with strike (drones),” Brovdi wrote. A Ukrainian drone commander, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive matters, told Reuters his unit had to postpone several combat operations as a result of the outage. Oleksandr Dmitriev, the founder of OCHI, a Ukrainian system that centralises feeds from thousands of drone crews across the frontline, told Reuters the outage showed that relying on cloud services to command units and relay battlefield drone reconnaissance was a “huge risk”. “If connection to the internet is lost … the ability to conduct combat operations is practically gone,” he said, calling for a move towards local communication systems that are not reliant on the internet. As of April 2025, according to Ukrainian government social media posts, Kyiv has received more than 50,000 Starlink terminals. Related Articles