Two undersea communication cables in the Baltic Sea have been severed, and at least one appears to have been physically severed. CNN has received confirmation from a local telecommunications company that the cable between Lithuania and Sweden was cut on Sunday morning. The second cable is located approximately 60 to 65 miles from the first cable and routes communications between Finland and Germany. The cause of the outage has not yet been determined, but authorities suspect “intentional damage.”
The outage follows a US warning in September about the increased risk of Russian “sabotage” of submarine cables. This followed a joint investigation by the public broadcasters of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland that Russia had deployed a fleet of scout ships in Nordic waters. They were reportedly part of a program designed to jam cables (and wind farms).
European countries are not completely free of online communications, as data is typically routed over multiple cables to avoid over-reliance on a single cable.
Senior, the state-run Finnish company that oversees the second cable, said the cause of the outage had not yet been determined as it had not yet physically inspected it. However, the sudden stop reportedly suggests that it too was severed by an external force.
The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany issued a joint statement on Monday. “We are deeply concerned by the cutting of the undersea cable connecting Finland and Germany in the Baltic Sea,” they wrote. “The fact that such incidents immediately raise suspicions of deliberate damage speaks volumes about the instability of our times. A thorough investigation is underway. Our European security is at stake. , is under threat not only from Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors. Protecting our shared critical infrastructure is critical to our security and societal resilience. It’s essential.”
The Lithuania-Sweden cable, which handles about a third of Lithuania’s internet capacity, will be repaired “in the coming weeks”, with the exact timing likely to be determined by the weather.
