[dkbrk]

I'm pretty sure I saw it mentioned that if the source and destination are Starlink dishes then packets will be routed by the satellites directly to the destination dish without going through any ground stations.

That means Starlink can, in fact, guarantee communications during outages (so long as the Starlink network itself isn't down). You just need to have Starlink service at both the send and receive sides and the communication effectively acts as a direct link.