Starlink outage hit Navy drone tests

A Starlink outage last August cut communications to about two dozen U.S. Navy drone boats off California and stopped the test for nearly an hour. (reuters.com) The disruption happened during a Navy exercise involving unmanned surface vessels, or drone boats, that were being tested as part of a larger push toward autonomous operations. Reuters reported the outage was global, affected millions of Starlink users, and left the vessels “bobbing” offshore until links came back. (reuters.com) Those boats are part of a Pentagon effort to field more uncrewed systems quickly, especially for a possible fight in the western Pacific. A Congressional Research Service brief says the Defense Department’s Replicator initiative is meant to deploy autonomous systems across air, ground, sea, undersea and space missions. (congress.gov) The Navy has a parallel networking push of its own. DefenseScoop reported in March 2024 that the service requested $139.8 million for Project Overmatch in fiscal 2025 and $716.7 million across its five-year plan to better connect ships, sensors and weapons. (defensescoop.com) Starlink matters here because it is a low-earth-orbit internet network: thousands of satellites flying much closer to Earth than traditional military communications satellites, which can reduce delay and widen coverage. Reuters reported Starlink now has close to 10,000 satellites and is already used in Pentagon work ranging from drones to missile tracking. (reuters.com) The same Reuters reporting said the August outage exposed a “single point of failure” inside the Navy test. That phrase means one broken link—in this case one communications provider—can stop a larger operation built to look distributed and resilient. (reuters.com) The drone program had already run into trouble before this latest report. Reuters reported in August 2025 that trial runs off California ended with crashes and software glitches, including one vessel hitting another after operators were dealing with a separate malfunction. (reuters.com) Pentagon officials have argued that commercial space networks give the military speed and scale it cannot quickly build on its own. Reuters said the Defense Department’s chief information officer, Kirsten Davies, responded that the department uses “multiple, robust, resilient systems” across its broader network, while the Navy and SpaceX did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. (reuters.com) For the Navy test off California, the practical result was simpler than the strategy debate: when Starlink went down, the drone boats stopped talking, and the exercise stopped with them. (reuters.com)