A telecommunications cable running between Lithuania and Sweden in the Baltic Sea has been damaged, Telia Lietuva, a Swedish telecoms company in Vilnius, has said.

“The cable was cut on Sunday morning, at around 10:00. The systems immediately reported that we had lost the connection. Further investigation and clarification took place, and it turned out that it was damaged,” Andrius Šemeškevičius, the company’s chief technology officer, told LRT TV on Monday evening.

This followed earlier Finnish media reports about an unexplained failure of an undersea cable between Finland and Germany.

According to Šemeškevičius, Telia transmits the internet connection to Lithuania through three cables, which means that the internet bandwidth was reduced by one-third due to the incident. However, the connection was restored to users after bypassing the fault.

The damaged cable is quite old and there have been several faults related to it. However, no cases of sabotage have been recorded so far.

“These failures are mostly related to shipping, when a ship hooks the cable and breaks it off somewhere in a shallow place, close to the shore, by dropping anchor incorrectly,” he explained.

This case is more serious, as Lithuania-Sweden and Germany-Finland cables intersect, Šemeškevičius added.

“Here we can see that the cables cross in an area of only 10 square metres, they intersect. [...] Since both are damaged, it is clear that this was not an accidental dropping of one of the ship’s anchors, but something more serious could be going on,” the Telia representative said.

Data transmission between Finland and Germany was completely interrupted. The nearly 1,200-kilometre-long cable is the only direct link of its kind between Finland and Central Europe and runs alongside other important pieces of infrastructure, including gas pipelines and electricity cables.

The failure of the only link between Finland and Central Europe comes weeks after the United States warned that it had detected increased Russian military activity around key undersea cables.