Ukraine suffered a comms outage when 1,300 SpaceX satellite units went offline over funding issues: CNN

YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 5, ARMENPRESS. Ukraine’s fears that its troops  may lose access to Elon Musk’s crucial Starlink internet service deepened in the past week after 1,300 of the military’s satellite units went offline, CNN reports citing two sources familiar with the outage.

The small, easy-to-use satellite dishes made by Musk’s private rocket company SpaceX have been universally hailed as agame-changing source of communicationfor Ukraine’s military, allowing it to fight and stay online even as cellular phone and internet networks have been destroyed in its war with Russia, CNN reports.

But concerns have risen recently over the dependability of SpaceX after discussions about funding were revealed and outages were reported near the frontlines. 

SpaceX sent a letter in September to the Pentagon claiming it had spent almost $100 million funding Starlink in Ukraine and that it could no longer continue to do so. The letter requested that the Defense Department  take over more of the funding  for Ukraine’s military, which it calculated would run tens of millions of dollars a month. 

Days after, Musk appeared to reverse course, claiming that SpaceX had withdrawn the request. 

“The hell with it,” Musktweeted, “we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”

The recent outage started on October 24 and was described by one person briefed on the situation as a “huge problem” for Ukraine’s military.