Summary
The undersea Estlink-2 power cable linking Finland and Estonia experienced an outage on Wednesday, prompting an investigation, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo announced.
Authorities stated the disruption will not affect electricity supplies in Finland or Estonia.
Concerns are heightened due to recent incidents involving undersea infrastructure in the Baltic, including severed data cables in November and the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines.
The cause of the Estlink-2 outage remains unclear.
Apparently The Chinese vessel Xin Xin Tiang was sailing over it when it happened
Time to ban ALL Chinese vessels from the area.
If China can redraw their oceanographic borders, so can Europe.
That particular one is Taiwanese I believe, and passed several minutes before the outage maintaining a constant pace.
Finnish border guard has stopped a tanker registered to Cook Islands that’s part of the Russian shadow fleet, which slowed down significantly while crossing the cable and was on site when the outage started.
Finnish border guard has stopped a tanker registered to Cook Islands that’s part of the Russian shadow fleet,
I think they have the right suspect - that ship did some maneuvering which was very odd. Pekka Lund has posted an animation of how it behaved:
https://bsky.app/profile/pekka.bsky.social/post/3le5jowncic2t
Edit: one can consider this almost solved. Motivation and who paid whom remain to be figured out, but when the border guard asked the ship to lift its anchors, it lifted an anchor chain without an anchor attached.
Another candidate has also appeared:
According to information from the maritime traffic monitoring service Marinetraffic, the tanker Eagle S had noticeably slowed its speed at the time the cable damage was identified.
Based on monitoring data, a border guard patrol vessel directed the tanker away from the area near the Porkkala Peninsula early in the evening on Christmas Day. By early Thursday morning, both vessels were still in the vicinity of Porkkala.
According to Marinetraffic, the oil tanker was en route from St. Petersburg to Egypt. The British maritime publication Lloyd’s List, which covers maritime traffic, reports that the Eagle S is part of Russia’s “shadow fleet.”
…and another incident has been reported too…
The German data center operator Hetzner also reported early Thursday that there were issues with the network connection between Germany and Finland, Helsingin Sanomat wrote on Thursday.
“There is currently a fault in the main network connection between Frankfurt and Helsinki. This may cause short-term latency issues. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your understanding,” the company stated in a press release.
suprise
