Virginians see Starlink satellites
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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.
SpaceX's Starlink satellite network was back up and running on Friday as engineers hunted for the root cause of one of its biggest international outages the night before, a rare disruption for the powerful internet system set off by an internal software failure.
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.
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Soldiers panicked, drones surveilling Russian forces went dark, and long-range artillery units struggled to hit targets.
According to The Kyiv Independent, the outage affected Ukrainian troops who rely on Starlink terminals, citing a Telegram message from the military saying Starlink is down across the entire front. The military now says its connections are back online after going down for about 150 minutes, “the longest in the war.”
The issue concerns sunlight reflecting off the satellites’ surfaces. SpaceX has attempted to reduce the brightness of the reflected light by coating the satellites in a dark material, and also by adding reflective film to redirect the sunlight away from Earth.
Starlink systems used by Ukrainian military units were down for two and a half hours overnight, a senior commander said, part of a global issue that disrupted the satellite internet provider.
Residents in the Queen City and the surrounding areas may have seen something unusual in the sky Saturday morning.