Event Summary
On 22 October 2025, SpaceX announced it had cut services to more than 2,500 Starlink Kits located at notorious scam centres in Myanmar. This follows heightened scrutiny: on 14 October, the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee reportedly opened an investigation into Starlink’s connections to those centres and sought testimony from Elon Musk. Around 16 October, some areas of Myanmar near the Thailand border experienced Starlink outages. Starlink — though not officially licensed in Myanmar — is widely used there (over 3,000 dishes in use) to bypass junta internet controls established after the 2021 coup. Anti-junta forces, humanitarian actors, journalists, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), and local communities rely on the service for communications, reporting human rights abuses, education, money transfers, and emergency medical help. Cutting services to devices linked to illicit activity addresses legitimate concerns about online crime, but broad or imprecise restrictions risk severing critical lifelines for pro-democracy groups, aid organisations, and vulnerable civilians in areas already subject to repeated internet blackouts and surveillance. The event thus raises immediate questions about targeting illicit actors without undermining humanitarian, educational, and civil society communications.