Two cables of the network company Global Connect broke between Sweden and Finland.
Aftonbladet and Helsingin Sanomat write about it.
According to the press secretary of the Swedish Post and Telecommunications Authority (PTS), Peter Ekstedt, the outage occurred on the territory of Finland in two places in the Helsinki area, at a distance of 3-4 kilometers.
According to Niklas Ekström, representative of the Swedish company Global Connect, one outage occurred in Espoo, the other in Vicht. One malfunction has already been fixed, another is being worked on. Almost 6 000 households in Finland were affected by the outages, he said. No problems were recorded in Sweden.
Swedish Civil Defense Minister Karl-Oscar Bolin initially said it was suspected that the cable break was intentional. However, Finnish police later said they were not currently investigating the cable breach.
The director of the security service of the telecommunications company Elisa, Jakko Wallenius, said that the damage to the cable in Vicht was not sabotage. According to him, the excavator working on the cable accidentally cut it. The driver of the excavator that damaged the cable reported the incident "on his own initiative."
- In mid-November, it became known about damage to underwater telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Germany, Sweden and Lithuania. The Danish Navy detained the Chinese cargo ship Yi Peng 3 on suspicion of involvement in the damage.
- Later, the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal reported that European investigators suspect the captain of the Chinese cargo ship of intentional damage. According to the investigation, the cables were damaged because the ship dragged the anchor along the bottom for more than 180 kilometers, and it was "extremely unlikely" that the captain would not have noticed it. Investigators are also investigating whether the captain worked with Russian intelligence.
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