Finland-Germany submarine cable disrupted due to glitch

The submarine cable between Finland and Germany went out of service on Monday due to a fault, said Finnish state-owned data transmission company Cinia in a press release.

The fault has been detected in the Cinia Oy C-Lion1 submarine cable at 4:00 a.m. resulting down of the services.

The details of the fault could not be known, and the authorities are investigating into the incident to get more information in this regard.

A repair ship has been dispatched from Calais, France, to fix the damaged submarine cable, reported Xinhua.

The point of breakage on the out-of-service submarine cable C-Lion1 is located to the east of the southern tip of Sweden's island of Oland, Cinia CEO Ari-Jussi Knaapila said at a press conference.

According to Cinia, the cable will be raised from the seabed, and repairs will be made aboard the ship.

Despite the malfunction of the cable, Finland's major commercial data communications operators Elisa and Telia said that customers may not notice any disruption, as communications are continuing via alternative routes.

The exact repair time is not yet known, but typically the repair time for submarine cables is between 5 and 15 days, said Cinia.

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.

Meanwhile, the Foreign Ministers of Finland and Germany in a joint statement expressed concern over the severed undersea cable in the Baltic Sea, said the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland.

“We are deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable connecting Finland and Germany in the Baltic Sea. 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,” the statement said.

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.