The Russian invasion of Ukraine has severely affected the Internet in Ukraine. Georgia Tech’s Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) project reported serious outages in Ukraine as of February 23.
Under these circumstances, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov sought help from SpaceX and Tesla billionaire Elon Musk.
In response, Musk tweeted: ‘Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.”
Starlink, SpaceX’s low-earth orbit (LEO) high-speed, low-latency internet service, is deemed to be far more reliable than traditional broadband.
Even before its invasion of Ukraine, Russia targeted the beleaguered nation with cyberattacks. On January 15, 2022, Russia installed malware and launched a DDoS attack on Ukrainian websites. Finally, in 2016, a Russian cyberattack cut off the power supply to the Ukrainian capital city, Kyiv.