Finland Says Subsea Germany Link Serving Data Centers Is Cut

(Bloomberg) — An undersea data cable connecting Finland and Germany was severed in the early hours of Monday by what was likely an external impact, authorities in the Nordic country said.

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The 1,200-kilometer (750-mile) high-speed fiber optic Helsinki-Rostock link serving data centers is damaged in the Baltic Sea east of southern Sweden, and there’s a high likelihood that it’s completely cut as all of its fiber connections are down, executives of its owner and operator Cinia Oy said at a news conference. Finland’s internet access is routed through Sweden.

Asked whether there are signs of sabotage or intentional acts, Chief Executive Ari-Jussi Knaapila said there’s “no way to assess the reason right now.”

“We can say that such damage doesn’t happen without some kind of external impact,” he said, listing ship anchors and bottom trawling as potential causes given there’s little seismic activity in the area.

Determining the cause will require getting a repair ship on site for further investigation, and the departure of OMS Group Sdn’s cable layer vessel Cable Vigilance is already being prepared in Calais, northern France, Cinia said. Such cable repairs typically take between five and 15 days, Cinia said.

There’s been no discernible impact on Finland’s internet access, Samuli Bergstrom, a director at the National Cyber Security Centre of Finland, said at the same news conference.

While Finland remains connected to the internet via multiple cables running through Sweden, the incident is reminiscent of events just over a year ago, when the anchor of a passing ship severed two data cables and a gas pipeline on the seabed of the Gulf of Finland.

Those events, and the explosions that destroyed the Nord Stream gas pipeline in 2022 have brought threats against critical infrastructure back to the attention of European countries.

–With assistance from Alex Newman.

(Updates with further information on incident throughout)