Two NATO submarine cables damaged in the Baltic Sea

Two submarine cables between four NATO countries have been damaged in the Baltic Sea.

Initially, there was information about a malfunction in the C-Lion1 submarine cable, which runs between Finland and Germany. This was reported by Yle with reference to Cinia, a company that deals with fiber optic networks and provides telecommunications services.

The telecommunications connection was interrupted. The cause of the malfunction is not yet known.

According to the Ilta-Sanomat newspaper, this is a cable break. The head of the Traficom Cyber ​​Security Center, Samuli Bergström, confirmed to Yle that C-Lion1 was damaged. He did not comment on where exactly the cable was broken.

The length of C-Lion1 is 1,173 kilometers. The cable runs between Helsinki and Rostock, Germany. It was put into operation in 2016.

The outage of the only link between Finland and Central Europe came weeks after the United States warned that it had detected increased Russian military activity around key undersea cables.

Later, on November 18, LRT TV reported that an undersea cable between Lithuania and Sweden had been damaged. This reduced the Internet capacity of Telia, which provides the connection to Lithuania, by a third. The causes of the incident are also being investigated.

“The cable was cut on Sunday morning, around 10:00. The systems immediately reported that we had lost communication. Further investigations and clarifications were carried out, and it turned out that it was damaged,” said Andrius Šemėškėvičius, Telia’s chief technical officer.

We will call that Ireland had previously “expelled” a Russian reconnaissance ship that had been spying on underwater infrastructure.

The ship “Yantar” was withdrawn from the Irish Sea after it entered Ireland’s exclusive economic zone and patrolled an area where there are underwater pipelines and cables for energy and the Internet.