A fault has been detected in the Cinia Oy C-Lion1 submarine cable between Finland and Germany early after 4 am on Monday, 18 November. Due to the fault, the telecommunications services provided over this cable are down. It comes on the heels of a subsea cable between Lithuania and Sweden becoming damaged on Sunday.
C-Lion1 is a submarine telecommunications cable between Finland and Germany with a length of 1173 km. The submarine cable was launched in 2016 and connects Central European telecommunications networks to Finland and other Nordic countries.
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Repairs take 5-15 days
Finnish company Cinia states that the details of the fault are not yet known and are currently being investigated. Corrective measures have been initiated and a repair vessel is getting ready to go to the site. The exact repair time is not yet known, but typically the repair time for submarine cables is between five and fifteen days.
Finland’s international telecommunication connections are routed via multiple routes and the impact of a single cable failure depends on the resilience of the service providers’ connections.
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Joint statement Finland and Germany
It is being feared the damage to the cable is intentional, like also happened with the Nordstream pipeline. In a joint statement, the Foreign Ministers of Finland and Germany state they ‘are deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable connecting Finland and Germany in the Baltic Sea.’
They add: ‘The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times. A thorough investigation is underway. Our European security is not only under threat from Russia‘s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors. Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security and the resilience of our societies.’
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Cable between Lithuania and Sweden also damaged
According to Swedisch telecommunications company Telia, a similar cable running between Sweden and Lithuania was also damaged. This happened on Sunday morning, at around 10 am, reports Lithuanian news site LRT.
Andrius Šemeškevičius, the Telia’s Chief Technology Officer, has told LRT TV that the damage is not likely caused by a ship’s anchor, in particular because the Lithuania-Sweden cable and the C-Lion1 intersect. He explains: ‘Here we can see that the cables cross in an area of only 10 square metres, they intersect. […] Since both are damaged, it is clear that this was not an accidental dropping of one of the ship’s anchors, but something more serious could be going on.’
Picture by Collinpetty, Wikimedia Commons.
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