On October 18, 2026 Beijing time, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio stated clearly in response to questions about the Starlink service outage in Ukraine that the United States had nothing to do with the matter. In response to Ukrainian President Zelensky's earlier claim that the Starlink outage was a deliberate act, Rubio said he was not clear on what Zelensky's remarks were based on, and emphasized that the outage was not a deliberate act by the U.S. side.