Elon Musk reportedly shut down Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine when its troops were launching a counteroffensive against Russia to recapture occupied territories.
According to Reuters, during Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia on September 30, 2022, its troops reportedly faced a communication blackout.
The incident led to a military disaster and prevented Ukrainian soldiers from retaking territory held by Russia, the report said on Saturday, quoting Ukrainian military officials.
It has been claimed that Musk told a senior engineer at the California office of SpaceX, which controls Starlink, to cut coverage in Ukrainian areas, including Kherson.
The internet went off when the Ukrainian forces were trying to reclaim Kherson—a strategic region north of the Black Sea.
The report, quoting a Starlink employee, said that the staffers complied and deactivated at least a hundred of the 50,000 Starlink terminals.
The move also affected other areas seized by Russia, including the Donetsk province.
Ukrainian troops panicked
A Ukrainian military official told Reuters that the troops on the battlefield faced a communications blackout.
The drones surveilling Russian forces went dark, and long-range artillery units, reliant on Starlink to aim their fire, struggled to hit targets.
As a result, the military official said the troops failed to surround a Russian position in the Kherson town of Beryslav.
Though Ukrainian soldiers eventually succeeded in reclaiming Beryslav, the move left the staffers at Starlink shocked.
One of the staff told Reuters that it enabled Musk to take “the outcome of a war into his own hands.”
It remains unclear whether Musk acted independently or was instructed to shut Starlink down.
But according to staff, Musk’s decision stemmed from his fears that Ukrainian advances could provoke nuclear retaliation from Russia.
Starlink suffered outage
The Reuters report came a day after Starlink suffered a global outage on July 24.
The company did not reveal the cause, but the incident renewed concerns about Starlink's central role in Ukraine's communications infrastructure during wartime.
This is not the first time that a report highlighting Musk’s influence on the Russia-Ukraine war has surfaced.
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Earlier, author Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk revealed that the tech mogul refused to allow Ukraine to use Starlink in 2022 to launch an offensive against Russia in Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014.
After the book was published, Musk denied a shutdown, saying that there had never been coverage in Crimea to begin with.
In February this year, Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov raised concerns over his country’s reliance on Starlink for frontline satellite communications.
Kyiv considering alternatives
He said that Kyiv is exploring alternatives to the US operator, that could complement or back up Starlink, if the service becomes unavailable.
“Regarding Starlinks, Kyrylo Budanov will say whether there is confirmation of this or not. But we are already working on it. There are alternatives. We do not disclose it yet. Soon, together with the Ministry of Digital Transformation and our other colleagues from the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Ministry of Defense, we will announce when we have these solutions. But there are solutions, there are alternatives," Umerov said.
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Starlink began rolling out service in 2020 and now has more than six million customers in over 140 countries, territories and markets, according to a Starlink social media post in June.
Documents reviewed by Reuters show that SpaceX had already been in discussions with the US government for operationising Starlink in Ukraine, before the Russian invasion. Rollout began after Russian troops crossed the border on February 24, 2022.
