Ukrainian Forces Find Elon Musk’s Satellite Internet Gone Off Before Russian Offensive

Starlink devices went completely offline.

The Russian offensive in northeastern Ukraine had been expected for months, but still came unexpectedly. Just before the invasion, Ukrainian units’ Starlink satellite Internet terminals, which are used, among other things, to broadcast video streams from reconnaissance drones, stopped working.

The 125th Territorial Defense Brigade controlled a 40-kilometer section of the border with the Belgorod region and, through drones, observed how the group was deployed from the Russian side. But on the morning of May 10, when the invasion occurred, the drone unit was “blind,” The Washington Post writes: The team lost all video data due to Russian electronic interference.

Communication is provided using the Starlink satellite Internet: Elon Musk’s SpaceX company provided this connection to Ukraine at the beginning of the war. Subsequently, the Pentagon ordered Starlink terminals for the Ukrainian military from SpaceX. The system is operated by more than 6,000 satellites located in low Earth orbit.

Starlink devices went completely offline for the first time since the Russian invasion in February 2022, writes WaPo. “At some point we went completely blind,” the commander of the 125th Brigade’s drone unit, call sign Artist, told the newspaper. “That was the biggest problem: we didn’t see them move, we only communicated by radio or telephone where they were still working.” The drone image, he said, “just disappeared.”

After the start of the offensive, a strong geomagnetic storm on the Sun that occurred on the evening of May 10th - the morning of May 11th could have affected the operation of Starlink. Musk called it “the biggest in a long time”, writing that the Starlink satellites were under “a lot of pressure.”