The “Starlink“ systems used by Ukrainian military units were not working for two and a half hours last night, a senior commander was quoted by Reuters as saying, BTA reported.
The “Starlink“ internet service suffered one of its largest outages worldwide last night when an internal software failure left tens of thousands of users without connection.
Ukrainian forces are heavily dependent on thousands of “Starlink“ terminals from the “SpaceX“ company (SpaceX) for its battlefield communications and the operation of some drones, as the service has proven to be resistant to espionage and signal jamming, Reuters reports.
“Starlink“ does not work on the entire front line“, wrote on “Telegram“ the commander of Ukraine's drone forces Robert Brovdy at 10:41 p.m. local time (and Bulgarian) last night.
He later updated his post and indicated that at around 1:05 a.m. this morning the problem had been resolved. He said the incident highlighted the risks of relying on the systems and called for the methods of communication and liaison to be diversified.
“Combat missions were carried out without (video) connection, reconnaissance of the battlefield was carried out with strike (drones)“, Brovdy said.
Olexander Dmitriev - founder of the Ukrainian system that centralizes information from thousands of drones along the front - said the service outage demonstrated that relying on cloud services for commanding units and transmitting intelligence from drones posed a huge risk.
“If the internet connection disappears […] the ability to conduct combat operations practically disappears“, he added, calling for a shift to communication systems that do not rely on the internet.
Although "Starlink" does not offer its service in Russia, Ukrainian officials say Russian troops are also using the systems on the front in Ukraine, Reuters notes.