Whether sabotage or innocent accident, suspicion immediately fell on the much-discussed wave of Russian-backed acts of sabotage against European infrastructure when an internet backbone cable linking Sweden and Finland was cut twice overnight.
Thousands of Finnish homes were left without data connectivity on Tuesday morning after a submarine fibre optic cable linking Sweden and Finland was cut in two places on land overnight. The damage took place in two separate suburbs near the Finnish capital Helsinki, in Espoo and Vihti, and the infrastructure’s owner has dispatched teams for repairs they said.
weden’s Minister for Civil Defence Carl-Oskar Bohlin told broadcaster SVT “sabotage is suspected” but the facts are not yet clear, nevertheless “we are taking this seriously”, he said, remarking Finnish Police are leading the investigation.
Finnish Police are investigating but say they have not launched a criminal probe yet. One of the breaks has been attributed to a man digging up the ground with a backhoe (‘JCB’ type digger) and may have been accidental, the telecom company said.
Niklas Ekström of cable owner Global Connect told Helsingin Sanomat that accident or not, it is odd to have two breaks in different places at the same time: “Cables break for many different reasons. It is certainly unusual for two cables to be damaged at the same time.”
Among the agencies notified in the response to the damage were the Swedish government’s postal and communications ministry, the Swedish armed forces, and the Norwegian Agency for ‘Social Security and Preparedness’.
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