What Up With Starlink?

Newsweek  |  Starlink communications device outages are straining the Ukrainian military as it mounts a counteroffensive to take back territory occupied by the Russians, according to Ukrainian officials.

Starlink, a satellite internet system operated by SpaceX, deployed technology to Ukraine after Russia invaded the country in late February. The company's billionaire CEO Elon Musk recently estimated that the company has spent $80 million in remote internet terminals for the Eastern European country.

However, the Financial Times reported on Friday that a senior government official in Ukraine said Starlink outages have created a "catastrophic" loss of communication on the frontlines of the war in Ukraine. One anonymous official told the newspaper that such outages occurred as forces were making advances into Russian-occupied areas. Soldiers also told the newspaper that the communications systems stopped working mid-battle, and that some Starlink technology hasn't worked in areas recently taken back from the Russians.

In an interview with Newsweek on Friday, V.S. Subrahmanian, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University, said that Russia "basically took out all of Ukraine's military communications" at the beginning of the war, and it's only when Starlink technology was introduced that "those comms went back to fairly reliable form."

Stephen Quackenbush, an associate professor of political science and the director of the Strategic Studies Program the University of Missouri, told Newsweek on Saturday that the outages "appear to be related to advances into territory previously occupied by Russia."

"That suggests that SpaceX is able to target access with a great deal of precision. It also appears to me to be an issue that they are working on improving, with greater coordination between the Ukrainian military and SpaceX," he wrote in an email.

He added that the outages don't change "the fact that momentum in the war is on Ukraine's side."

"While Russia has continued attacks in the Donetsk Oblast with limited success, Ukrainian advances in the northern (Kharkiv/Luhansk) and southern (Kherson) fronts over the past month have been beyond anything that Russia has been able to achieve since the spring," Quackenbush said.

Meanwhile, Subrahmanian said he doesn't believe the outages will pose a major problem for the Ukrainians in the long-run, saying that the Ukrainian military "has multiple ways of getting information to their troops" and has had continued support from the West.