Second damaged submarine cable discovered in the Baltic Sea

A damaged submarine communication cable was discovered between Lithuania and Sweden after a similar incident between Finland and Germany.

Telia Lietuva’s Chief Technical Officer Andrius Šemeškevičius announced that the communication cable between Lithuania and Sweden was damaged.

Telia Lietuva, a company of the Telia Company group, is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the Baltic States.

“The cable was cut on Sunday morning, around 10:00. The system immediately notified us that we had lost connection. We investigated and clarified, and it turned out that the cable was damaged,” Šemeškevičius said.

According to him, Telia transmits Internet connections to Lithuania via three cables.

And because of this incident, Internet bandwidth has been reduced by a third. However, users will not feel it.

Meanwhile, data transmission between Finland and Germany has been completely interrupted due to a cable break.

It was the only direct link of its kind between Finland and Central Europe and ran alongside other important subsea infrastructure, including gas pipelines and electricity cables.

The cable is 1,173 kilometers long and runs from the Gulf of Helsinki to Rostock in Germany.

It runs next to Russia’s non-functional Nord Stream, which was designed to facilitate installation work.

Both incidents occurred a few weeks after the United States detected increased Russian military activity around major undersea cables. At the same time, there is growing talk in the West that undersea communications and energy maritime infrastructure could be targets of hybrid attacks by Russia and that such facilities are very difficult to protect.