Once again, data cable breaks have been detected in the Nordic region. This time, two data cables running between Sweden and Finland have been broken. So there are two separate breaks. This is what Peter Ekstedt, a press officer at the Swedish Post and Telecommunications Administration (PTS), told the Swedish news agency TT.
- We received the information yesterday. It concerns two fiber cables on land in Finland, he says.
The Swedish government, the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, and the Swedish Defense have been informed. The cable breaks are said to have occurred on land - unlike two other breaks that recently affected data cables in the Baltic Sea. According to information from Sveriges Radio, Finnish police suspect that a crime has been committed in connection with the latest breaches.
Finland's Minister of Transport and Communications Lulu Ranne stated on the social media X that the authorities are investigating the case together with the network owner GlobalConnect.
- The authorities are investigating the case together with the company. We are taking the situation seriously, she writes.
GlobalConnect is investigating at least one damaged data cable in Finland on Tuesday morning, the company said according to Reuters. According to GlobalConnect, two separate breaches have caused a widespread data outage in Finland. The breaches occurred on Monday afternoon, it says. According to GlobalConnect's website, the company is responsible for handling more than half of all data traffic in the Nordic region.
In November, it emerged that two underwater cables had been damaged in the Baltic Sea. One cable runs between Finland and Germany and the other between Sweden and Lithuania. Swedish and Finnish police are investigating the incidents as sabotage.
Attention has been particularly focused on the Chinese cargo ship "Yi Peng 3", which, around the time of the breaches, passed the places in the Baltic Sea where breaches in the data cables were subsequently found. Sweden has sent a formal request to China for help in clarifying what happened in connection with the breaches in the two data cables.
Ships from authorities in several countries - including Denmark, Sweden and Germany - have recently been near the "Yi Peng 3", which is lying idle in the Kattegat outside Danish territorial waters, but in the Danish economic zone. This is not the first time that there has been suspicion of sabotage committed against cables or pipelines in the Baltic Sea.
In September 2022, there were breaches in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, which were subsequently investigated as sabotage by the police in several countries. The case of the ruptures of the two wires has not yet been resolved.
jel /ritzau/
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