[dotnet00]

As one example, IIRC earlier this year they lost some freshly launched satellites in a batch because of a flare, which made the atmosphere expand in density by up to 50% at their altitudes and didn't allow those satellites to point their solar panels at the sun in time.

Starlink sats are launched into a very low orbit and use their ion thrusters to raise into an operational orbit so any which happen to be nonfunctional deorbit very quickly (in the 2 months between this happening and it being reported, many of the involved satellites had already deorbited) and because it maximizes how many they can put up per launch.

So the satellites were lost, as they needed the panel pointed at the sun to sufficiently power the thrusters to overcome drag, but if they moved out of the safe mode orientation of having the solar panel edge point in the direction of motion, the drag would be too high.