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Submarine cables severed, sabotage assumed

The C-Lion1 submarine cable between Finland and Germany was cut in the early hours of Nov 18, 2024. This was announced by the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency (Liikenne- ja viestintävirasto, Traficom). The president and CEO of the operator Cinia Group, Ari-Jussi Knaapila, stated that such damage does not occur without external influences,. To determine the cause, a repair ship must be on site. The departure of the 'Cable Vigilance' of the OMS Group Sdn is already being prepared in Calais. Such cable repairs usually take between five and 15 days. The German data center operator Hetzner Online has connected its data center park in Finland via the C-Lion1 and is a co-investor in the submarine cable project. The Sea Lion cable, which consists of eight pairs of fiber optic cables, was manufactured by the Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks (ASN) in Calais. The cable is 1,170 kilometers long and weighs 3,355 tons. It was delivered in Finland by the cable-laying ship 'Ile de Brehat'. The laying of the Cinia-C-Lion1 submarine cable began on Oct 12, 2015 in Helsinki and was successfully completed after three months when it reached its destination in Rostock. On Nov 18 at around 10 a.m. LT, the 218-kilometer-long BCS East-West submarine cable between Sventoji in Lithuania and the Swedish island of Gotland also failed, according to the Lithuanian landline and mobile operator Telia Lietuva, which belongs to the Swedish Telia Company. The country is connected to the Internet via three cables from Telia Lietuva. This limits the transmission capacity. The damaged cable is quite old and there have already been several disruptions. However, no cases of sabotage have been registered so far. The operator of the BCS East-West is the Swedish company Arelion, a Tier 1 network provider. This case is serious because the cables cross between Lithuania and Sweden and between Germany and Finland n an area of ​​just 10 square meters. Since both have been damaged, it is clear that this was not an accidental setting of a ship's anchor, but that something more serious could be going on. The German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius assumed it was sabotage and obvious that it was a hybrid action, before consultations of the EU defense ministers. He does not assume that the fiber optic cables were accidentally damaged by dropped anchors. Rather, it is "a clear sign that something is going on here."