Three more communication cables are experiencing failures in Estonia

On December 25, 2024, Elisa Eesti AS and CITIC Telecom CPC notified the Estonian Consumer Protection and Technical Supervision Department (TTJA) of outages in three submarine communication cables between Estonia and Finland. Two of these cables belong to Elisa and one belongs to CITIC Telecom.

Currently, the outages do not cause significant problems for end users, and communication services between the countries remain available. The cause of the malfunctions has not yet been established, but companies are repairing the cables. The cable owners are also cooperating with the relevant authorities to determine the causes of the damage.

Estonia's external communications have redundancy: in the event of damage to one of the cables, there is a possibility of using alternative routes via other submarine cables or land lines through Latvia, which ensures a stable Internet connection.

In connection with this situation, an emergency meeting of the Estonian government will be held today at 16:00, and a press conference at 18:00 to discuss the emergency shutdown of Estlink 2 and measures to protect underwater infrastructure. The press conference will be attended by Estonian Prime Minister Kristian Michal.

Recall that on December 25, the EstLink 2 underwater power line between Estonia and Finland failed for unknown reasons.

The damage to the underwater power line in the Gulf of Finland between Finland and Estonia may have been intentional, as two ships were passing through there. One has a Chinese registration and is in contact with another suspicious ship.

Earlier, an internet cable between Finland and Sweden was damaged. According to the investigation, it could have been deliberately anchored by the Chinese dry cargo ship Yi Peng 3 with a Russian crew, which was moving suspiciously with its transponders turned off.