Finland Indicates Accidental Damage to Undersea Cables

The Finnish transport agency, Traficom, has indicated that fiber-optic cables linking Finland and Sweden seem to have been severed unintentionally. Traficom stated, “Both cables appear to have been cut during construction work,” and confirmed that repairs to the cables have been completed. Previously, the Swedish government had voiced suspicions of an act of “sabotage” concerning the cable connecting the two nations. However, Finnish police reported that they found no grounds to believe criminal activity was involved. The Nordic telecommunications company GlobalConnect informed the BBC that excavation work was responsible for at least one of the disruptions. GlobalConnect’s Swedish division reported that approximately 6,000 Finnish households experienced service interruptions on Monday. Users in Sweden were not impacted by this fault. Although the suspicion of “sabotage” by Swedish authorities now seems unfounded, the period following Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has been marked by increased tensions in the Baltic Sea and several occurrences of damage to underwater infrastructure.