Reports Of Starlink Outages In Ukraine Fuel Speculation That Elon Musk Is Playing Petty, Inflaming Heated Discourse Online

October 7th, 2022 - 3:40 PM EDT by Brandon Wink

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Elon Musk starlink meme.

A few days ago, Elon Musk publicly tweeted what he thought would be a good plan to enact a ceasefire in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, which was immediately met with pushback and people trying to label Musk a Russian agent. When his decision to give the Ukrainian people access to Starlink (his satellite communications network) to aid in the war effort was brought up during this, many lambasted that as being "ineffective" and not really him being helpful.

Now, mere days after those accusations went out, the Starlink system has now reportedly gone down in several parts of Ukraine, leading to catastrophe as Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines have reportedly found themselves without communications abilities.


Due to the timing of these outages, and what was said previously about Starlink in Ukraine, as well as accusations of Musk being Russian-aligned, it didn't take long for some on social media to suggest that Musk had something to do with this, supposedly as part of some petty play on making people be aware that he was impactful in the Ukraine war.

This recent bout of speculation and controversy has led to multiple people asking for him to be investigated or directly calling on others to try and put pressure on Musk, with some even going as far as to suggest that Starlink should be taken off his hands for "national security" reasons.


It's currently unknown why Starlink is experiencing issues exactly, but according to Roman Sinicyn (a coordinator at the Serhiy Prytula Charity that donates Starlink systems to Ukraine), the problem is purportedly somehow related to SpaceX attempting to prevent its misuse by Russians.



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