Suspected Russian-Chinese submarine cable sabotage
- Cloudflare says European countries saw “little to no observable impact” after cable damage
- BSC East-West Interlink and C-Lion1 cables were recently damaged
- Several redundancy options kept affected countries online
The recent damage to submarine internet cables in the Baltic Sea, which has affected some European countries, may not have been as bad as before after Cloudflare claimed the possible sabotage had “little to no discernible impact.”
The company attributed this to Europe’s robust internet infrastructure, which demonstrated a high degree of resilience, supported by a network of redundancy options to keep the continent connected to the internet.
Two lines were affected: the BSC East-West Interlink cable between Lithuania and Sweden, and the C-Lion1 cable connecting Finland to Germany.
The damage to the internet cable did not really affect us
Cloudflare used metrics such as internet quality, latency and bandwidth in the supposedly affected countries to show that networks remained stable.
The BCS East-West Interlink, which was damaged on November 17, normally carried about a third of Lithuania’s internet capacity, but alternative routes allowed the country to stay connected without major disruption.
A day later the C-Lion1 cable was damaged. Minor fluctuations in internet performance were observed, such as a small change in bandwidth and latency in Finland, but these were resolved within just a few hours.
While submarine cables are critical to keeping countries connected to the internet, several redundancy options make it extremely difficult to completely cut off a country.
Sweden is connected by more than twenty submarine cables, while Finland and Germany have ten. They also benefit from land-based fiber optic networks, all of which help keep the countries and their critical infrastructure connected during such outages.
However, the threat of sabotage of submarine cables remains a major concern for many countries. The Danish Navy recently intercepted a suspected Chinese ship, highlighting the need to protect these physical connections.
Earlier in 2024, we reported that NATO had unveiled plans to use satellite links to protect against undersea cable attacks, while other consumer options like Starlink promise to keep citizens connected.