Berlin, Dec 3 (AP) Two data cables running across the land border between Sweden and Finland have been repaired, a day after they were damaged affecting 6,000 private customers and 100 businesses, a company providing digital infrastructure and data communication in Northern Europe said Tuesday.
Global Connect said the internet cables were damaged in two separate places in southern Finland on Monday.
The first fibre breakage happened on Monday morning, the other one in the afternoon.
“During the night the first of the cables was repaired, so we could restore internet to approximately 95 per cent of all the customers," said Global Connect's spokesman in Sweden, Niklas Ekström, adding that by noon on Tuesday the second cable had also been fixed and that all customers should have internet again.
Ekström said that one incident was related to excavation works and the second one was still being looked into.
“We have no analysis on this so far,” Ekström said.
Similar cable damages happen about every couple of months, but it was unusual that two cables in the same region were damaged on the same day, he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Stockholm.
Finland's minister of transportation and communications, Lulu Ranne, wrote on X that “authorities are investigating the matter together with the company. We take the situation seriously.”
Police in Finland put out a brief statement Tuesday saying that they "are not currently conducting a criminal investigation into the damage caused to a fibre-optic cable between Finland and Sweden.”
The incident comes after the rupture of two data cables on the Baltic Sea bed last month. The two, one running from Finland to Germany and the other from Lithuania to Sweden, were both damaged in Swedish waters.
Finnish, Swedish and German authorities launched investigations into that incident.
Germany's defence minister said at the time the damage appeared to have been caused by sabotage, though there is no proof at present.
Last week, Sweden formally asked China to cooperate in explaining the rupture of the Baltic Sea data cables where a China-flagged vessel had been sighted. (AP)
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