At 23:00 GMT last night a major outage of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet network started affecting all users.
SpaceX’s global network of Starlink ultrafast broadband satellites, which form part of a mega constellation in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), appeared to suffer a major service outage at just after midnight (UK time*) last night that lasted almost two hours before the situation returned to normal….
However, major outages have been fairly rare (most regular connectivity problems are usually related to end-user location / setup), but sadly another one did strike last night. Luckily the issue occurred at a time when the impact upon UK users will have been very minimal, although some customers did still report problems.
Starlink promptly acknowledged the issue, and it was then soon resolved, although there’s currently no solid verifiable information available on the cause. During the outage, some customers also reported that they could no longer sign-in to Starlink’s website
*The UK is currently on British Summer Time (GMT +1) A 2 hour outage would therefore have lasted from approximately 23:00 to 01:00 Universal Time
Overnight Ukraine launched a large scale attack on its occupied port of Sevastapol in Crimeam hitting two Russian Navy ships in dry dock and causing more damage.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence said later that Ukrainian forces launched 10 cruise missiles at the shipyard and three unmanned sea drones at Russian ships in the Black Sea.
Seven missiles were shot down and the sea drones were destroyed, the ministry said, but some of the missiles damaged two ships that were being repaired at a shipyard in Sevastopol.
“The Ukrainian armed forces launched a strike with 10 cruise missiles at the S. Ordzhonikidze ship repair plant,” the Russian Defence Ministry said on Telegram.
“As a result of being hit by enemy cruise missiles, two ships undergoing repairs were damaged,” the ministry said.
Sevastopol is the largest city in Crimea and a major port where the Russian Black Sea Fleet is based.
Ukraine’s Kyiv Independent news outlet said the attack took place at approximately 3am local time (00:00 GMT).
There has recently been allegation the Elon Musk turned off Starlink access over occupied Ukraine which led to an earlier sea drone washing up on the Crimean. The author of the book about Musk which precipitated the criticism has now clarified the events on TAFKAT (The App Formerly Known As Twitter) .
To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.
Any link between these three events is, of course, entirely co-incidental but it does appear the Ukrainians are not now dependent on Starlink to conduct sea drone attacks on Crimea.
