Pentagon Disturbed as Its Fleet of Drones Is Left Bobbing in the Ocean When Elon Musk's Starlink Fails [View all]

Two dozen unmanned surface vessels — autonomous boat drones, basically — were left floating in the Pacific ocean after a massive outage of SpaceX’s Starlink internet service left them adrift. That event, first reported by Reuters, left the experimental robots disconnected and bobbing in the ocean for nearly an hour off the coast of California.

It was one of several Pentagon experiments disrupted by the Starlink blackout, according to Reuters. That global outage left millions of Starlink customers in the dark back in August of 2025, dealing a blow to the company’s image as an always-on satellite internet provider. While service was eventually restored, the incident left customers frustrated and analysts concerned.

According to the company website, Starlink offers “high-speed, low-latency internet with more than 99.9 percent average uptime and reliable connectivity around the globe.”

That remaining 0.1 percent clearly represents a lingering pain point, though. Pentagon officials, who are increasingly leveraging Elon Musk’s pet internet company to run its massive drone program, previously voiced issues with Starlink reliability. Per Reuters, a similar drone test in April of 2025 suffered from spotty network connections, as Starlink struggled to handle the Navy’s demanding data use.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/pentagon-disturbed-fleet-drones-left-151009664.html