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SpaceX Confirms Brief Starlink Outage Disrupting Ukraine Frontline Links

The second disruption in weeks renews concern over Ukraine’s dependence on a privately run network for critical wartime communications.

Overview

  • SpaceX acknowledged a temporary Starlink outage on September 15 and briefly posted an incident notice on its website before it was removed.
  • A Ukrainian drone commander reported service loss across the entire frontline, with connectivity gradually returning within roughly 30 to 60 minutes.
  • Monitoring site Downdetector recorded tens of thousands of problem reports worldwide during the disruption.
  • SpaceX has not identified a cause for the latest incident, which follows a 2.5-hour global outage in July attributed to a core network software fault.
  • Ukraine has deployed more than 50,000 Starlink terminals, about 30,000 provided by Poland, intensifying concerns over the risks of relying on a privately controlled system.