Starlink, Satellite
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Starlink, owned by Elon Musk, has changed the game in terms of internet accessibility in rural and other underserved areas lacking high-speed broadband infrastructure. It has 2 million US subscribers, and more than 6 million globally.
Starlink appears to have largely recovered from a widespread outage on Thursday afternoon that affected its services across the United States and other parts of the world. Reports of service disruptions flooded outage tracker Down Detector earlier in the afternoon, with users experiencing internet outages and, in some cases, total blackouts.
On Friday, Reuters reported that Musk ordered SpaceX staff to cut off Starlink during a 2022 Ukrainian counteroffensive. The move, which left Ukrainian troops without communications access, raises ongoing concerns that the world’s richest man might use his control over the service to influence political and military outcomes.
According to outage detector Downdetector, reports of outages with Starlink began to spike around 3:24 p.m. ET with more than 57,000 reports. The problems continued to arise with a peak of more than 58,000 reports at around 3:39 p.m. ET.