The picture provided by The Finnish Border Guard shows Finnish Border Guard's offshore patrol vessel Turva guarding on October 11, 2023 at sea near the place where damaged Balticconnector gas pipeline is pinpointed at the Gulf of Finland. Lehtikuva/FINNISH BORDER GUARD via REUTERS
HELSINKI, Nov 18 (Reuters) – A fiber optic communications cable linking Finland and Germany along the seabed has stopped working and may have been severed by an outside force, Finnish state-controlled cyber security and telecoms network company Cinia said on Monday.
The 1,200 km (745 miles) C-Lion1 cable running through the Baltic Sea from Finland’s capital Helsinki to the German port of Rostock malfunctioned just after 0200 GMT, the company said.
The sudden outage implied that the cable was completely severed by an outside force, although a physical inspection has not yet been conducted, Cinia’s Chief Executive Ari-Jussi Knaapila told a press conference.
The damage occurred near the southern tip of Sweden’s Oland island and could typically take between five and 15 days to repair, he added.
Cinia said it was working with authorities to investigate the incident.
Last year a subsea gas pipeline and several telecoms cables running along the bottom of the Baltic Sea were severely damaged in an incident raising alarm bells in the region.
Finnish police investigating the 2023 case have named a Chinese container ship believed to have dragged its anchor as a prime suspect, but have not said whether the damage was believed to be accidental or done with intention.
In 2022 the Nord Stream gas pipelines linking Russia to Germany in the Baltic Sea were destroyed by explosions in a case that remains under investigation by German authorities.
(Reporting by Essi Lehto in Helsinki and Louise Breusch Rasmussen in Copenhagen, editing by Terje Solsvik, William Maclean)
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2024.
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