Germany Suspects Sabotage After Undersea Internet Cables Are Severed
By Kate Brady, Leo Sands, Ellen Francis, The Washington Post
November 19, 2024
BERLIN — Germany’s defense minister said the cutting of two undersea internet cables appeared to be deliberate acts of “sabotage.”
The incidents are “a very clear sign that something is going on here,” Boris Pistorius told reporters in Brussels ahead of a meeting of European Union defense ministers Tuesday. “Nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed.”
An underwater communications cable connecting Finland and Germany was cut Monday morning, its operator Cinia said, a day after damage was reported to a separate internet cable linking Lithuania and Sweden, also in the Baltic Sea.
While it was still unclear what exactlyhappened, Pistorius said he suspected that the damage was inflicted deliberately. “We have to state, without knowing exactly who it came from, that this is a hybrid action,” he said, referring to the combined use of conventional military combat with other means of warfare, such as clandestine operations or cyberattacks, to target adversaries.
“We also have to assume … that it is sabotage,” Pistorius added.
Cinia, the Finnish operator of the C-Lion1 cable between Finland and Germany, said the “cut” to its communications cable was detected east of the southern tip of the Swedish island of Öland, in Sweden’s economic zone.
“Yesterday, after 4 a.m. local time in Finland, we noticed an incident in the submarine connection between Finland and Germany,” Taneli Vuorinen, Cinia’s executive vice president, said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “The assumption is that the cable is fully cut because all the connections are out at the moment,” he said.
Cinia, which is majority-owned by the Finnish state, is preparing a vessel to repair the damage, Vuorinen said, a process he estimated could take five to 15 days to complete.
Most internet customers are unaffected, but Vuorinen said that some smaller-scale disruption was possible.
Finnish and German foreign ministers said in a joint statement Monday that they were “deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable.” They added: “The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times.” An investigation is underway, they said.
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