Elon Musk's Starlink suffered a rare global outage on Thursday, knocking tens of thousands into the dark for about two hours and 30 minutes, drawing an apology from its founder, Musk, an equally rare thing to behold.
Starlink, known for its high speed and accessibility, has more than six million users across roughly 140 countries and territories.
The outage occurred "due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network," according to Michael Nicolls, the company's vice-president of engineering.
However, this innocuous explanation may hide portentous consequences that can change the course of global events, as exemplified by a similar outage in 2022.
On that occasion in late September, Musk's abrupt order to cut internet coverage in areas of strategic importance to Ukraine disrupted a pivotal counteroffensive by its military to regain territory from Russia.
His order threw Ukrainian troops into disarray. They suddenly faced a communications blackout, according to a Ukrainian military official, an advisor to the armed forces, and two others who experienced Starlink failure near the front lines.
Drones surveilling Russian forces went dark, and long-range artillery units, reliant on Starlink to aim their fire, struggled to hit targets as panic took over the soldiers.
The order was all the more strange considering that Starlink provided satellite internet service to help Ukraine's military maintain battlefield connectivity early in the war.
As of April 2025, according to Ukrainian government social media posts, Kyiv has received more than 50,000 Starlink terminals, with an initial batch provided by SpaceX itself.
An exclusive report by Reuters, just a day after Tuesday's outage, brought this issue of increasingly layered and intrusive leverage of non-state ultra-rich privateers to the fore.
Reuters, citing three sources familiar with the matter who sought anonymity, reported that Elon Musk instructed a senior engineer at SpaceX's California office to cut Starlink coverage in regions including Kherson—a strategic area north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was attempting to reclaim.
"We have to do this," Starlink engineer Michael Nicolls reportedly told colleagues upon receiving the order, according to one of the sources.
Staff complied, the sources said, deactivating at least a hundred Starlink terminals as their hexagon-shaped cells went dark on an internal map of the company's coverage.
As a result, the Ukrainian military official and the military advisor said, troops failed to surround a Russian position in the town of Beryslav, east of Kherson, the administrative centre of the region of the same name.
"The encirclement stalled entirely," said the military official in an interview. "It failed."
Musk's order, which hasn't previously been reported, is the first known instance of the billionaire actively shutting off Starlink coverage over a battlefield during the conflict.
The command effectively reshaped the front line of the fighting, enabling Musk to take "the outcome of a war into his own hands," another one of the three people said, although the SpaceX owner denied any such allegations.
Although it is still unclear what prompted Musk's command, when exactly he gave it, or precisely how long the outage lasted, the three people familiar with the order said they believed it stemmed from concerns Musk expressed later that Ukrainian advances could prompt nuclear retaliation from Russia.
Some senior US officials shared Musk's concerns that Russia would make good on threats to escalate, one former White House staffer told Reuters.
A tech titan who rivals sovereign governments
Musk's order, which significantly altered the outcome of the battle, provides an early premonition of the sway the tech giant now holds in geopolitics and global security.
The success of Starlink has bestowed Musk with increasing influence with political leaders, governments and militaries across the world, even before his brief and controversial role as financial backer and advisor to US President Donald Trump.
Musk's sway in military affairs in Washington and beyond has reached a level which was previously limited to sovereign governments alone.
"Elon Musk's current global dominance exemplifies the dangers of concentrated power in unregulated domains," Martha Lane Fox, a member of Britain's upper house of parliament, said during a debate earlier this year.
"Its control," Fox said of Starlink, "rests solely with Musk, allowing his whims to dictate access to vital infrastructure."
Underscoring the point himself during his recent dispute with Trump, Musk threatened to decommission a SpaceX spacecraft the US now relies upon to transport astronauts and critical cargo.
His threat, later retracted, unnerved attorneys at NASA, who felt forced to explore whether Musk's warning could be considered a notice of contract termination, according to two people familiar with the matter.
"There needs to be some contractual assurances" that Musk won't cut off services to the U.S. government, said Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator of the agency. "We will need to consider how comfortable the U.S. will be at putting SpaceX in the critical path on national security."
Starlink in Bangladesh: A digital revolution or new dependency?
This year, as early as May, Starlink docked in Bangladesh with the promise of connecting even the remotest regions of the nation to high-speed internet services.
The chief adviser of the interim government, Muhammad Yunus, assured that this deal meant that internet blackouts could no longer be weaponised by the state as had happened during the July uprising last year.
However, in light of the report on Starlink's selective service deactivation, that promise now appears to be a double-edged sword.
As nations increasingly depend on private tech giants for everything from cybersecurity to digital infrastructure and data storage, concerns are mounting over the cost of reliance, particularly for countries like Bangladesh that possess limited geopolitical leverage.
The question is no longer just about access, but about control: What happens when a foreign entity holds the switch to critical national infrastructure? And how can smaller nations safeguard their digital sovereignty in an era where corporate interests may override democratic or humanitarian imperatives?
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