HELSINKI (AFP) – Finnish authorities said yesterday that they were investigating the cause of damage to a fibre-optic cable between Finland and Sweden that was cut a day earlier.
A Nordic digital infrastructure provider, GlobalConnect, said a land-based Internet cable connecting the two countries had been severed in two places, causing a “major outage”.
Finnish Transport and Communications Minister Lulu Ranne posted on X that “authorities are investigating the matter in collaboration with the company”.
One of the cuts has already been repaired, said a director at the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency’s Cyber Security Centre Samuli Bergstrom.
One of the cuts had been caused by a digger during “a usual maintenance issue”, Bergstrom told AFP, while the cause of the other cut was still being investigated.
Sweden’s Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said in a message to AFP that “the Finnish police are investigating what happened and, given the circumstances, sabotage is suspected”.
However, Finnish police later clarified that while they were investigating the incident, they were not “currently conducting a criminal investigation into the damage caused to a fibre-optic cable between Finland and Sweden”.
The reports of the damaged cable came around two weeks after the rupture of two telecom cables in the Baltic Sea, one linking the Swedish island of Gotland to Lithuania, and the other connecting Finland to Germany.
Finnish, Swedish and Lithuanian authorities have established a joint team to investigate the damaged cables, with the support of Eurojust, the European Union’s agency for criminal justice cooperation.
