A rare global interruption in the Starlink Satellite Internet Network struck the subscribers on Thursday for more than two hours on Thursday, the longest widespread malfunction since SpaceX opened the service for consumers almost five years ago.
The malfunction influenced civil and military users and created an inconvenience for many, but the cutting of a critical lifeline for those who rely on Starlink for military operations, health care and other applications.
Michael Nicolls, vice -president of SpaceX of Starlink Engineering, wrote on X that the network failure lasted approximately 2.5 hours.
“The malfunction was due to the failure of important internal software services that serve the core network,” Nicolls wrote. “Our apologies for the temporary disruption of our service; we are deeply committed to providing a very reliable network and will completely root this problem and ensure that it does not take place again.”
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, apologized for the interruption of the service on X: “Sorry for the malfunction. SpaceX will remedy the cause to ensure that it no longer happens.”
Effects large and small
The Ukrainian army is at the front of hiring Starlink Services and adjusting the system for use in war zones. The exploitation of Ukraine of Starlink -Connectivity has played an important role in directing military operations, supporting battlefield communication and controlling drones that deal with exploration and attacking strikes.
The commander of the drone troops of Ukraine, Robert Brovdi, confirmed that the Starlink loss reached the continuous war of his country with Russia on Thursday.
“Starlink was about the whole front,” Brovdi wrote on Telegram. “Combat operations were carried out without broadcasts; exploration was carried out … using shock weapons.”
Brovesti added that the interruption of the service illustrates the importance of having multiple paths of connectivity, especially for time -critical military operations. “This incident, which lasted 150 minutes in the war, points to bottlenecks,” he wrote, encouraging the army to diversify his resources of communication and connectivity.
Oleksandr Dmitriev, the founder of a Ukrainian system that centralizes feeds from thousands of drone cemans about the front line, Reuters said that the malfunction was an example of the shortcomings of trusting cloud services for military operations, in particular Battlefield Drone Reconnaissance.
