Two undersea fibre-optic communications cables in the Baltic Sea, including one linking Finland and Germany, have been severed, raising suspicions of sabotage by bad actors.
The episode on Monday recalled other incidents in the same waterway that authorities have probed as potentially malicious, including damage to a gas pipeline and undersea cables last year and the 2022 explosions of the Nord Sea gas pipelines.
The 1,200-kilometre (745-mile) cable connecting Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working around 0200 GMT on Monday, Finnish state-controlled cybersecurity and telecoms company Cinia said.
A 218-km (135-mile) internet link between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island went out of service at about 0800 GMT on Sunday, according to Lithuania’s Telia Lietuva, part of Sweden’s Telia Company group.
It probably was bad actors, but occasionally, ship anchors dragging along the bottom can also destroy them (eg, oil tankers, extended cargo ships, cruise ships, etc.)