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.
Damn, again?
Apparently The Chinese vessel Xin Xin Tiang was sailing over it when it happened
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.
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.
suprise
Time to ban ALL Chinese vessels from the area.
If China can redraw their oceanographic borders, so can Europe.
When will the world deal with Putin properly?
When his candidate elect causes a recession in the US, triggering a global recession, causing the energy market to retract, affecting his ability to pay his window cleaners, causing him to take a terrible fall out of one when attempting to clean them himself
What should they do?
Bomb the shit out of the russian military and enegy sector by flooding Ukraine with weapons.
What I think people over here actually will do, is - start patrolling the shorter, more critical cable and pipeline routes with sea drones - and if the drone operators spot a ship with a lowered anchor, summon a proper military vessel to do more complex procedures.
…summon a proper military vessel…
Like a missile.
One will surely want to keep the ship, to auction it off and cover repair costs.
Send a bill to the governing body of the country where it’s registered and add on a hefty service charge to cover labor/materials/cleanup.
Do tell us what “proper” handling of Putin would be.
Assassination.
That’d create a power vacuum, and we sure as hell don’t want to risk someone worse taking his place.
The assassinations will continue until morale improves.
Would be pretty damn hard to do that
The first rule of history is that it can always get worse.
Maybe it doesn’t. Or maybe somebody starts a nuclear war to avenge Putin.
Putler strikes again
Via a Chinese ship anchor.
I’ve always found it with that we just have these very important wires just lying there exposed on the sea bed… You’d think this kind of stack would have happened much more previously
I wonder what he gets out of it. I can understand the Kremlin making arson attacks happening in Europe for example, but this? What’s the end goal here?
For me it will just awaken the sleepy countries faster.
Usually there’s not that much of a reason to sow dissent against Russia, but Ukraine is losing pretty badly and there’s not a another nordstream for them to blow up.
Yes Ivan, here is 100 rubbles for your indoor toilet fund.
It was either the US or Ukraine, depending on if you believe Seymour Hersh.
That single act destroyed the economy of Germany and is probably the single act most responsible for AfD doing so well now.
It would also have been the first act of war by a NATO member against another NATO member, if you believe Seymour Hersh.
It was far far more destructive then cutting an internet line, and yet everyone here seems to forgotten it because it is a problematic thing to be concerned by for thee people that want war with a nuclear power.
What are you even talking about. You sounds like a schizophrenic who forgot to take their medication, answering questions that exists only in your own mind.
And you sound like a racist.
The person you were responding to correctly pointed out the destruction of the Nordstream was done by …well, not Russia. And the destruction of that underwater pipe ( very much like an underwater cable) was used as a propaganda point by trying to blame Russia for its destruction.
Not a hard analogy to understand.
Huh, racist and poor reading comprehension. I guess it should be obvious those two would go together.
This is a weird strategy, but I guess that’s the only code fascists have left.
Hope they don’t “rush in” to any conclusions.
I actually hope they do rush - not with conclusions but with diagnostics - just a little.
If it’s another spontaneous breakdown (there have been some) then there’s plenty of time. If however someone damaged it, then hours = kilometers.
However, this cable has previously had transformer malfunctions, a short circuit at the site of climbing onto ground (ground shifted over years - I hope it hasn’t shifted again), but in light of recent power games on the Baltic sea, it would also be a candidate for plowing with anchors.
Timing is pretty annoying. Baltic countries are leaving the old Soviet power grid synchronization area (physically disconnecting from Russia and Belarus and synchronizing with continental Europe) really very soon (in about a month) and nobody here would appreciate power connections being disrupted at this time.
Do you know of any good articles exploring this power grid infrastructure disconnection?
Hmm. Fishy. The article makes it sound like they sea it as an accident. Hopefully this incident doesn’t rise up any waves.
Blyat!
