The SHEFA-2 underwater cable, which connects the Faroe Islands to Scotland’s mainland through the Shetland and Orkney Islands, suffered damage in two separate instances last week, rendering much of the island without Internet access.
In separate events, three critical subsea cables linking Marseille to Lyon, Milan and Barcelona were deliberately severed in the south of France, according to the cable’s operator, affecting internet service for consumers in Europe, Asia and the United States. Cloud service providers worked quickly to repair the backbone infrastructure.
According to a report by the cloud security company Zscaler, the unanticipated cable damage caused packet loss and increased latency for websites and apps transiting the damaged pathways.
While the French authorities believe sabotage occurred, their Scottish colleagues are still unsure of what actually severed the wires.
“We expect it will be fishing vessels that damaged the cable but it is very rare that we have two problems at the same time,” Páll Vesturbú, the head of infrastructure for Faroese Telecom stated. Subsea cables are frequently harmed by fishing trawlers when their nets, or occasionally anchors, drag on the ocean floor. Experts, however, are alarmed by how frequently these occurrences have been happening recently.
After multiple explosions shut down the Nord Stream pipeline in September, fears of submarine sabotage have intensified. However, the possibility of numerous incidents occurring simultaneously to the European underwater fiber infrastructure is causing significant concern. There is some speculation that Russian submarines may have deliberately damaged the global Internet infrastructure, considering Russia’s role in the present geo-political situation caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
