Russia-Ukraine war: When Elon Musk shutdown Starlink in 2022, drones went dark — how much power does SpaceX boss hold?

Several Ukrainian officials recently alleged that SpaceX abruptly restricted its "military-grade" Starlink services that Ukraine used on the battlefield against Russia. Sources told Axios that the disruptions were observed late Tuesday, but they were restored later.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv's limited access to Starlink led to civilian deaths because Ukrainian interceptors using the technology could no longer knock down Russian drones as effectively.

In response to reports, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk highlighted the difference between Starlink and Starshield services, sparking confusion over whether the US government or SpaceX restricted access in Ukraine.

Starshield is a militarised version of Starlink that has become a key component of Ukraine’s war in Russia. Starlink provides commercial services, while Starshield is designed for government and national security missions and provides secure communications with higher levels of encryption. Starshield, however, relies on the broader Starlink network.

Musk’s comments on X sought to shift responsibility away from his company by only referring to Starshield as the US government-owned hardware. Axios quoted sources as saying that both SpaceX-owned Starlink and 'US-controlled' Starshield services for Ukraine were disrupted this week.

There was no confirmation from Musk or the US government on whether they deliberately restricted access. While the system has since been restored, it remains unclear who made the call and why.

The decision ignited a firestorm over who controls access to the technology on the front lines of Ukraine, with Ukrainian officials placing the blame on both Musk and President Donald Trump’s administration.

Not the first time

This wasn't the first time Ukraine's access to the Starlink system was restricted during the war with Russia that began in February 2022.

The first known instance of the billionaire actively shutting off Starlink coverage over a battlefield during the conflict was in September 2022, Reuters had said in its special report

What happened in 2022?

In late September 2022, during a pivotal push by Ukraine to retake territory from Russia, Elon Musk reportedly gave an order that disrupted Ukraine's counteroffensive and dented Kyiv’s trust in Starlink.

SpaceX started providing the satellite internet service early in the war to help Ukraine’s military maintain battlefield connectivity.

While Musk's company didn't confirm the claim, sources told Reuters that Musk had told a senior engineer at SpaceX's California offices to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim.

Staffers complied, the three people told Reuters, deactivating at least a hundred Starlink terminals, their hexagon-shaped cells going dark on an internal map of the company’s coverage. The move also affected other areas seized by Russia, including some of Donetsk province further east.

What impact did it have on Ukraine's operation in the battlefield?

After Musk’s order, Starlink failure was experienced near the front lines of the war. Ukrainian troops suddenly faced a communications blackout, according to a Ukrainian military official, an advisor to the armed forces, and two others who experienced the failure.

Soldiers panicked, drones surveilling Russian forces went dark, and long-range artillery units, reliant on Starlink to aim their fire, struggled to hit targets, according to Reuters' special report.

As a result, the Ukrainian military official and the military advisor said that troops failed to surround a Russian position in the town of Beryslav, east of Kherson, the administrative center of the region of the same name. “The encirclement stalled entirely,” said the military official in an interview. “It failed.”

Ultimately, Ukraine’s counteroffensive succeeded in reclaiming Beryslav, the city of Kherson and some additional territory Russia had occupied.

According to the report, panicked calls by Ukrainian officials during the outage to seek information from Pentagon counterparts were met with few explanations for what could have caused it, five people familiar with the incident said.

What prompted Musk's 'order'?

It wasn’t clear what prompted Musk’s command, when exactly he gave it, or precisely how long the outage lasted.

Three people familiar with the order told Reuters that they believed it stemmed from concerns Musk expressed later that Ukrainian advances could provoke nuclear retaliation from Russia.

One of the people was quoted as saying that the shutoff transpired on September 30, 2022. The two others said it was around then, but didn’t recall the exact date.

Some senior US officials shared Musk’s concerns that Russia would make good on threats to escalate, one former White House staffer told Reuters.

What did Musk, SpaceX say on 2022 incident?

The account of the command countered Musk’s narrative of how he has handled Starlink service in Ukraine amid the war. As recently as March that year, in a post on X, his social media site, Musk wrote: “We would never do such a thing.”

Musk and Nicolls didn’t respond to requests from Reuters for comment. The US Department of Defense declined to comment. Reuters couldn’t determine whether White House or Pentagon officials after the shutdown had any exchanges with Musk over the outage.

A SpaceX spokesperson said by email to Reuters that the news agency’s reporting is “inaccurate” and referred reporters to an X post earlier this year in which the company said: “Starlink is fully committed to providing service to Ukraine.”

The spokesperson didn’t specify any inaccuracies in this report or answer a lengthy list of questions regarding the incident, Starlink’s role in the Ukraine war, or other details regarding its business.

In 2023, SpaceX had said that it had taken unspecified steps to prevent Ukraine from using Starlink for certain activities, including drone attacks.

“Our intent was never to have them use it for offensive purposes,” Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president, said at a conference in Washington in February of that year. “There are things that we can do, and have done” to prevent it, she added, without providing further detail.

Starlink still provides service to Ukraine which is heavily reliant on thousands of SpaceX's Starlink terminals for battlefield communications and some drone operations, as they have proved resistant to espionage and signal jamming throughout the three and a half years of fighting Russia's invasion.

Starlink does not operate in Russia. But Ukrainian officials have said that Moscow's troops are also widely using the systems on the frontlines in Ukraine.

The 2025 incident

Starlink had experienced one of its biggest international outages in July 2025. A senior commander has told Reuters that Starlink systems used by Ukrainian military units were down for two and a half hours overnight. The outage was part of a global issue that disrupted the satellite internet provider. "Starlink is down across the entire front," Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine's drone forces, had said on Telegram in 2025.

Musk’s dominance in military affairs: Can he influence conflict in Ukraine?

The Reuters report noted that Musk’s sway in military affairs in Washington and beyond – through Starlink’s dominance in satellite communications and SpaceX’s clout in space launches – has reached a dimension previously limited to sovereign governments, alarming some regulators and lawmakers.

Musk’s "order" affecting Kherson raised concerns about his ability to influence the conflict in Ukraine. It shocked some Starlink employees and 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.

Meanwhile, Martha Lane Fox, a member of Britain’s upper house of parliament, said during a debate earlier in 2025, “Elon Musk’s current global dominance exemplifies the dangers of concentrated power in unregulated domains."

The parliamentarian is a businesswoman and former board member at Twitter, the social media site that Musk acquired in 2022 and rebranded as X.

“Its control,” Lane Fox said of Starlink, “rests solely with Musk, allowing his whims to dictate access to vital infrastructure.”

Musk blocked Starlink services in Crimea?

The Kherson episode is distinct from an earlier report of an incident that purportedly occurred that same September, involving Crimea just to the south.

In his 2023 biography of Musk, author Walter Isaacson reported that the tycoon had ordered Starlink to disable coverage in Crimea, which Russia had annexed from Ukraine after a 2014 invasion that the international community condemned as illegal.

Musk, Isaacson wrote, believed a planned Ukrainian attack on Russian vessels in the Crimean port of Sevastopol could prompt nuclear retaliation.

After the book was published, Musk denied a shutdown, saying that there had never been coverage in Crimea to begin with.

The SpaceX boss had said he had, rather, rejected a Ukrainian request to provide service ahead of Kyiv’s planned attack. Isaacson later conceded his account was flawed. A spokesperson at Isaacson’s publisher declined to comment or make him available for an interview.