A request from a government official led to the sending of Starlink user terminals by SpaceX. Mykhailo Fedorov, the vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation in Ukraine, made a direct plea to Musk on Saturday.
@elonmusk, while you try to colonize Mars—Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space—Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand.
About 10 hours later, Musk said that Starlink service was active in Ukraine. Fedorov thanked Musk and the Ukrainian ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, for swift decisions related to authorization and certification that allowed the Starlink to be activated.
If we get any information about how many Starlink user terminals are being sent to Ukraine and how they are distributed, we will update this article.
According to a Fortune report, Starlink was supposed to hit Ukraine in 2023. The relay towers that Starlink uses to provide Ukraine with internet coverage are located in neighboring countries, where Russian troops can't target them, according to Fortune.
The ongoing war will make the project challenging, as it is not clear how quickly service will be deployed or how widely it will be available. A CNBC reporter shared a post on Facebook from a person in Ukraine who said they got the green light to use Starlink, but it was not clear if it was already set up.
AdvertisementViasat said its satellite broadband service was down in Europe. According to a Sky News report today, Viasat said its investigation into the outage continues, but so far we believe it was caused by a cyber event. Sky News quoted a person who said the outage appeared to have been caused by a distributed denial of service attack.
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has disrupted non-satellite Internet access. The southern and eastern parts of the country have had the most severe internet problems.
Connectivity to GigaTrans, Ukraine's main Internet provider, dropped to below 20 percent of normal levels before returning to higher levels in the early hours of Friday morning, according to Internet monitoring organization NetBlocks.
"We currently observe national connectivity at 87 percent of ordinary levels, a figure that reflects service disruptions as well as population flight and the shuttering of homes and businesses since the morning of the 24th," Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, told Reuters.
"While there is no nation-scale blackout, little is being heard from the worst affected regions, and for others there's an ever-present fear that connectivity could worsen at any moment, cutting off friends and family," Toker said.
NetBlocks has more information here.
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