How Starlink outage forced Ukraine to fight without internet: 'Combat without video feed'

A senior Ukrainian commander said on Friday that Elon Musk's Starlink systems were down for at least two and a half hours overnight, affecting the forces that have been fighting a protracted war with Russia. The outage revealed Ukraine's communication vulnerabilities.

The country's forces are reliant on Starlink for communications on the battlefield and drone operations. Starlink's global outage was the result of an internal software failure, which disabled internet services for thousands of users across the world.

On Thursday, Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine's drone forces, which uses Starlink, wrote on Telegram that the service was down "across the entire front," reported Reuters.

Starlink, which has partnered with two service providers in India, has over 6 million users across 140 nations. It acknowledged the global outage on X, an Elon Musk-owned platform, saying they were "implementing a solution".

By 1.05 am on Friday, the issue had been resolved, said the commander. However, he said, the incident revealed the risk of reliance on just one service and demanded diversification of Ukraine's communication networks.

He said that due to the outage, combat missions were performed without a video feed, and battlefield reconnaissance was performed without drones. "Combat missions were performed without a (video) feed, battlefield reconnaissance was done with strike (drones)," he wrote.

Another commander told the agency that his unit was forced to postpone combat operations because of the Starlink outage.

Oleksandr Dmitriev, the founder of OCHI, a Ukrainian system that centralises feeds from thousands of drone crews across the frontline, told Reuters that the outage highlighted the risk of relying on Starlink's internet services.

"If connection to the internet is lost ... the ability to conduct combat operations is practically gone," he said.