Pentagon reliance on Starlink exposed by outage

April 16, 2026

Last August, U.S. Navy officials carrying out a test of unmanned vessels realized they had hit a single point of failure: Starlink. A global outage across Elon Musk’s satellite network, affecting millions of Starlink users, had left two dozen unmanned surface vessels bobbing off the California coast, disrupting communications and halting operations for almost an hour.