Mystery fault takes out undersea internet cable between Germany and Finland

It's worth mentioning that cable breakages happen quite often; globally about 200 times per year [1] and the article itself mentions that just last year, two other cables and a gas pipeline were taken out by an anchor. The Gulf of Finland is evidently quite shallow. From what I understand, cable repair ships are likely to use ROVs for parts of repair jobs but only when the water is shallow so hopefully they can figure out whether the damage looks like sabotage before they sever the cable to repair it. Of course, if you're a bad actor and want plausible deniability, maybe you'd make it look like anchor damage or, deliberately drag an anchor right over the cables.

Cable repairs are certainly annoying and for the operator of the cable, expensive. However, they are usually repaired relatively quickly. I'd be more worried if many more cables were severed at the same time. If you're only going to break one or two a year, you might as well not bother.

1: https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...

> Joint statement by the Foreign Ministers of Finland and Germany on the severed undersea cable in the Baltic Sea

> 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.

https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/newsroom/news/-/2685132

And also the cable between Lithuania and Sweden:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/18/telecoms-cable...

Substantial Russian activity also near UK, raises concerns that Russia would cut off UK. [0]

Russian ships ‘plotting sabotage in the North Sea’ [1]

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-undersea-...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ships...

So what's the solution ? Assign a surveillance UAV to every Russian ship parked "without a good reason" over a cable ? It would be expensive, but doable, and create a reserve of vehicles for wartime use.

Dumb question but my assumption is fiber optic cables could be “tapped”? But the disruption would be noticeable when monitoring the cable. Could you just tap it when you cut it and when it hooked back up that’s the new baseline with the tap in place? That would seem more of a logical reason then a country just randomly cutting lines to me?

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/c-lion1 for reference

It'd be nice to see stories about a western navy or two getting off its butt, and actually trying to discourage "accidents" which damage critical infrastructure.

Hetzner seems unaffected?

    ping hel1-speed.hetzner.com

Gives me 52ms from Germany which should be about normal?

It is really a bad plan to attack that type of infrastructure in the way they are waking up hardcore gamers and other sleeping techies!

Looks like a pretty transparent hint on how response to the recent US/UK/France permission to use long-range missiles against the Russian territory could look like. The Nord Stream sabotage has opened Pandora's box almost exactly how it was predicted in Cryptonomicon.

Probably yet another case of fish trawlers or some dumbass freighter captain not reading the sea charts before dropping their anchor.

I'm all for finally showing the Russians a response for their covert warfare... but this is not the right opportunity. This kind of situation happens many times every year (and the causes are almost always the same, with a few cases of submarine landslides or seismic events).

Swedish telco Telia reports that the undersea internet cable between Sweden and Lithuania was also damaged on Sunday: https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2416006/undersea-ca...

Btw last time they damaged the finnish cables it was a chinese merchant vessel. Not just russians doing sabotage at the baltic sea

> "it’s obvious this wasn’t an accidental anchor drop.”

If it's "he who shall not be named", gotta admit, that's a clever strategy: ramp up sabotage and see how NATO/EU will feel about their "red lines", and how well does that article 5 really work in practice. Is it worth more than the paper it's printed on? Let's find out!

People have been laughing at the West crossing multiple Russian "red lines" and the Russians not doing anything. So the Russians can follow a similar route: a cable torn here, a warehouse blows up there, maybe a bank website is hacked, water supply or power station company blows up "randomly". Is anyone going to launch nuclear bombs because of that? That's absurd, of course not, yet NATO/EU just looks weak and pathetic in the process.

Ideally, these countries should ramp up similar acts of sabotage on the Russian territory if they confirmed that's exactly who it is. A dam fails in Siberia, maybe the payment system goes down for a week, a submarine catches on fire while in port for repairs. Honestly I don't think they have the guts to do that.

Some regimes only speak the language of power. They have to be believably threatened; calling them on phone to chat and beg for them to behave, is just showing more weakness. Scholz just called Putin. Anyone remember Macron talking with Putin for tens of hours at the start of the war? A lot of good that did. When they see a credible fist in front of their nose, that's the only way they'll stop.

Closing in on at least 3 years of hybrid warfare and yet this is nothing but a "mystery".

Sounds very similar to what happened to Nord Stream oil pipelines.

Just a little unnerving

I dislike the immediate jumping to “war, sabotage, destruction!” that happened in this article. Cable breakage happens quite often, and sometimes are caused by such menial things as sea debris, or at times, sharks chewing on them [1].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissacristinamarquez/2020/07/...

Sharks love undersea cables, except the fact that AFAIK there are no sharks in the baltic Sea https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/shark-attacks-threaten-...

I wonder how expensive it would be to bury undersea fiber cables deeper under the seabed to protect them from anchors cutting them. It might be cheaper to just install a second cable far enough away that they are unlikely to be cut at the same time.

Time for Biden to write a bunch of letters of marque, and get Russian ships out of our seas.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6869

It seems that the obvious solution could be Starlink-style meshes.

Can anybody comment on how fragile the Starlink protocol would be during a war? If its line-of-sight, presumably it would be hard to jam?

So to keep score, in the last year we've seen cables sabotaged between Finland and Germany, Lithuania and Sweden, Estonia and Sweden, Estonia and Finland. Any others I missed? You might say it's too early to call it sabotage, but the earliest two cable incidents were exactly the same, so it's hardly a coincidence at this point.

This would be an excellent time for Germany to announce that it is tripling munitions production, and that they’re going to do whatever they have to do to protect the territorial integrity of Europe. But they won’t.

The constant Russian interference, combined with the regular escalation from the jets patrolling, and the radar jamming, really needs to be dealt with.

We're stuck between having to do timid actions and full NATO escalation. This feels like constant creep.

I keep wondering if that scale of operation that we are witnessing is their "testing the waters" phase and it is 1% of their true capability, of if what we're seeing is already their full-steam operational pace.

They do a good job of instilling fear, but we've learned from Ukraine that there are a lot of paper Tigers in that army that aren't as capable in a real fight as they are in a demonstration.

How much of this is news and how much of it is normal occurrences due to shipping or fishing?

Nord Stream Part II

It will end up in the need to destroy Russian saboteur boats on sight. Putin is a moron if he thinks piracy methods will help him.

It's just practice. Locate the cables, establish a means of damaging them, deploy the means as a test and a show of force.

The western economy is almost completely built using off-prem in Cloud PaaS environments. It should be pretty fun when WW3 starts and not a single hospital, school, laboratory, or factory can operate.

Looks like Russia preparing another warcrime invasion

Predictable blowback and it's only going to get worse.

It's like 3rd or 4th submission of this news today? One of the previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42175676

Discussion (44 points, 5 hours ago, 43 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42172565

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42172565

sharks. maybe even Russian sharks.

Root cause is known and obvious; Minuteman III is a solution, to moderate bully you need 10x response

So blowing up North Stream was fun, but this somewhy isn’t. I’m very often puzzled by the logic and morale in the West.

I'm surprised there's such a cable in the first place, it seems it would be easier to go on land through Denmark and Sweden. Is it for some reason easier to have an undersea cable than a land one?

We can put atomic mines every yard along the cable ... or explode completely this planet.

At the time there will be no more Earth, they will be no more problem with human.

I do not support the war, or violence in general.

But EU & NATO ante engaged in a hybrid war with Russia.

- It actively supports a military which is engaged with Russian forces

- It has seized Russian financial assets

- I doubt that attacks on Russian infrastructure are perpetuated (planned & executed) just buy Ukrainian forces

I do not try to support any side by this statement. My point is that by any rational account is a “hybrid involvement”. EU & NATO are part of an active conflict.

This makes them targets for symmetrical actions — economic warfare by means of sabotage.

I look forward to everybody completely missing the resolution to this mystery when it turns out it was something like a Danish sailing boat that got unlucky with their anchor...