A global outage has occurred in the Starlink system
On Thursday 24 July 2025, at around 20:30 GMT, the Starlink global satellite communications system went down worldwide. At around 21:00 GMT, Starlink's website posted a message stating that their system was experiencing technical issues and that they were working to resolve them.
The Starlink satellite communications system is widely used in remote locations where other types of communications cannot be laid. In addition to remote places on the planet, it is widely used on ships, aircraft and industrial facilities (wells, wind turbines, etc.). In Ukraine, due to the Russian invasion, Starlink is actively used both for civilian purposes (as mobile operators' base stations and even node switches in the frontline areas have been destroyed) and for communication with the military on the frontline and drone control.
Robert Brovdi, the commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces, has already announced that Starlink is down. It's too early to say whether the situation at the front is critical.
Starlink has not yet disclosed the cause of the failure. It could be a technical malfunction or a hacker attack. Starlink has already experienced outages before, but it seems that it has never experienced such a massive one. At least not recently. According to the NetBlocks tracker, Starlink's traffic has dropped to 16% of its normal level, meaning that the network is almost completely inoperable.
The Ukrainian military is considering several alternative satellite communications systems. Among the alternatives are the UK's Viasat, Luxembourg's SES, Spain's Hisdesat, and the French-British Eutelsat/OneWeb. Negotiations are also underway with IRIS², but its launch will take place in the 2030s, so this option is more of a long-term prospect.
It is also worth mentioning that on 12 December 2023, Russians launched a cyberattack on the equipment of Ukraine's largest mobile operator Kyivstar, completely disabling the network core, which led to a complete loss of communication for several days and took months to resolve. We hope that Starkink did not have a Russian "mole" among its employees, as there is no physical access to the satellites, unlike the base stations.
Source: militarnyi.com
