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The damaged Finnish-German cable could take 15 days to repair, according to Finnish telecom Cinia Oy.
On Sunday (17 November), a subsea cable in the Baltic Sea connecting Lithuania and Sweden was cut. This was shortly followed by another subsea cable, this time connecting Finland and Germany, being damaged on early Monday morning. It has been revealed that the two cables were 10 metres away from one another.
The 218km internet cable between Lithuania and Sweden went out of service at about 10am on Sunday, according Telia Lietuva, the company that operates the cable.
“The systems immediately reported that we had lost the connection. Further investigation and clarification took place, and it turned out that it was damaged,” Telia’s CTO Andrius Šemeškevičius told LRT TV.
Meanwhile, the 1,200km C-Lion1 cable –which has been operational since 2016 – connecting Finland’s Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working at around 2am on Monday.
The cable was laid to help businesses in central Europe connect with data centres in the Nordic nations.
Ari-Jussi Knaapila, CEO of the Finnish state-controlled cybersecurity and telecoms company Cinia Oy, which owns and operates cable, said there was currently “no way to assess” the cause of the incident. “We can say that such damage doesn’t happen without some kind of external impact,” he told Bloomberg.
Knaapila added that a ship’s anchor on the ocean floor could have caused the cable to be cut and added that the cable could take up to 15 days to repair.
In a joint statement released yesterday, Finland and Germany said that they were “deeply concerned” about the severed cable.
“The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times.
“A thorough investigation is underway. Our European security is not only under threat from Russia‘s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors. Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security and the resilience of our societies,” they said.
A 2023 investigation into a damaged subsea gas pipeline connecting Estonia and Finland in the Baltic revealed that a Chinese container ship had damaged the pipeline, which China claimed was an accident.
Meanwhile, a German investigation into the 2022 Nord stream gas pipelines explosions is still underway.
Connecting countries, subsea cables – which transfer approximately 99pc of the world’s internet traffic – are highly geopolitical.
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