Authorities in Finland are investigating a broken fibre-optic cable after two separate cuts caused an outage affecting thousands of households.
The Swedish government said it suspected an act of “sabotage” on the cable, which links the two countries, but Finnish police said they did not yet have reason to suspect criminal activity.
Nordic telecoms group GlobalConnect told the BBC at least one of the breaks had been caused by excavation work, adding that the second break was still being investigated and repaired.
There have been several cases of suspected infrastructure sabotage in the Baltic Sea region in recent weeks.
A GlobalConnect spokeswoman told the BBC that “excavation work” had broken one of the cables.
“It is too early to say what caused the issue on cable two. The team is investigating,” she added.
Earlier, Swedish authorities said sabotage of the cables was suspected.
Finland’s Minister of Transport and Communications Lulu Ranne posted on X: “The authorities are investigating the matter together with the company. We take the situation seriously.”
GlobalConnect in Sweden said around 6,000 households in Finland were affected on Monday. The fault did not affect users in Sweden.
The period since Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has seen heightened tension in the Baltic Sea and a number of incidents involving damage to undersea infrastructure.
Sweden has formally asked China to co-operate with an investigation into damage to two cables in the Baltic Sea last month.
The cables – one linking Sweden to Lithuania and the other between Finland and Germany – were damaged in Swedish territorial waters in the Baltic Sea on 17 and 18 November.
A Chinese ship, the Yi Peng Three, is believed to have been in the area at the time and has since been anchored in international waters off Denmark.
