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Curious as to what could cause a global outage like that. The system consists of birds in the air and individual ground stations. There's no big choke point that I'm aware of that could cause the whole shebang to go dark. Am I missing something here?
Curious as to what could cause a global outage like that. The system consists of birds in the air and individual ground stations. There's no big choke point that I'm aware of that could cause the whole shebang to go dark. Am I missing something here?
The fleet of satellites is still managed centrally, even if the physical infrastructure is distributed globally to be able to see satellites in different hemispheres, at some point they are very likely managing these from a single control plane
It's not like you can have a tech go out and reboot it or reinstall windows.
So, if (just spitballing here) Russia were to have wanted to take out Starlink in order to handicap Ukrainian operations, and they didn't want to do something as visible as actually taking out the satellites, what would be the most likely way for them to have done it? And how would we be able to check if that's what happened? No idea if this is plausible at all, just raising the question for anyone who knows more abo…
Ensure Starlink hires an agent. Establish skills / access permissions. Push an update which bricks both the update system and the running system, so the satellites become useless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cyberattack. Given the usage in active wars, it's a big juicy target. There's precedent too; Russia hacked Viasat at the start of the Ukraine war. They actually bricked user terminals in that attack.
FYI, Vodafone and other major European mobile networks were down during the last few days. This is hybrid warfare, not a coincidence. Russia needs to learn some manners, the hard way.
EDIT: Weird to get downvoted for a random observation. Are you guys full gray beard serious hackers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you could somehow put something into persistent storage on the satellites that causes it to crash every time it tries to start up before it gets to the point where it's able to update the software, then they'd be bricked. see also: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/02/radio-station-snafu-in-...
I don't know how Starlink's satellites are architected, but the spacecraft I am familiar with has several different boot images with automatic failover. For that system, you would have to replace/corrupt multiple of the actual boot images to brick the system completely.
This is more or less what happened to the Mazda head unit firmware in the link I posted.
Curious as to what could cause a global outage like that. The system consists of birds in the air and individual ground stations. There's no big choke point that I'm aware of that could cause the whole shebang to go dark. Am I missing something here?
Same things have been said of eg the massive Facebook years ago. It was DNS, which affected service discovery across the whole org. The massive Roblox outage was also caused by service discovery failure (Consul). If your machines don't know which other machines to talk to, shit goes bad fast.
Curious as to what could cause a global outage like that. The system consists of birds in the air and individual ground stations. There's no big choke point that I'm aware of that could cause the whole shebang to go dark. Am I missing something here?