Reports of service disruptions flooded outage tracker DownDetector, with users experiencing internet outages and, in some cases, total blackouts. Starlink and its founder, Elon Musk, confirmed the outage and said they were investigating the issue.

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.

Starlink's biggest international outage on Thursday, caused by an internal software failure, knocked tens of thousands of users offline. "Starlink is down across the entire front," Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine's drone forces, wrote on Telegram at 10:41 p.m. (1941 GMT) on Thursday.

Starlink suffered a rare global outage on July 24, leaving tens of thousands offline. Here’s what caused it and what happens next.

A rare global interruption in the Starlink satellite Internet network knocked subscribers offline for more than two hours on Thursday, the longest widespread outage since SpaceX opened the service to consumers nearly five years ago. The outage affected ...