In Europe, Asia and the US nothing worked in a few cases last Wednesday. The internet sometimes went down, in different countries it worked very slowly or sometimes not at all. The reason for this: in Marseille, three internet cables between the continents were damaged, cloud company Zscaler announced.
At the same time, the internet also completely went out on the Scottish Shetland Islands. Even the ATMs weren’t working, the BBC reports. Shortly before that, an internet cable between the Faroe Islands and Shetland was cut.
Is the Kremlin behind this?
According to the operators, it is very unlikely that several internet cables will fail at the same time due to a technical malfunction. An adviser to Scottish Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon (52) told the BBC on Thursday that it was “a great coincidence that two cables were damaged at the same time”. The rumors in the background: sabotage by Russia.
After the suspected attacks on the oil and gas pipelines in recent weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin (70) could now try to sabotage the global internet. There are concrete indications for this. US naval expert HI Sutton discovered that shortly before the incident, a Russian government research vessel had spontaneously and without notice changed its route and suddenly passed very close to the cables.
It is not yet clear whether the ship actually has anything to do with the destruction. The ship may have served as a diversion, Sutton said. Due to the war in Ukraine, Russian ships are currently very closely watched and deviations from the routes are attracting great interest.
Internet is very vulnerable
Internet sabotage wouldn’t be particularly difficult: the highly critical Internet infrastructure is extremely vulnerable. Internet data is transported around the world via relatively few cables. By 2022, there will be 530 submarine cables worldwide, according to a map by market research firm TeleGeography. The cables are about as thick as a garden fence wire – and barely protected.
The map also shows that some regions, especially remote islands, rely on just one cable. If this is damaged, the affected area is back in the analog era. According to “Zeit”, this became a problem in the Tonga archipelago in February. An underground volcanic eruption damaged the only internet cable to the archipelago northeast of New Zealand. The residents had to be without internet for five weeks until the lines worked again.
Putin could now benefit from this reliance on the thin and insecure cables. As the expert Marc Helmus told Die Zeit, Marseille is a particular problem. There 16 deep-sea cables from different continents come together – there is hardly an easier possibility of sabotage.
DB sabotage had a similar pattern
According to the expert, according to the photos published by the French police, there are many indications that the cable has been professionally disconnected in Marseille. The perpetrators would probably have known the way and exactly which cable to cut. A similar pattern was already found with the large-scale failure of Deutsche Bahn in early October.
At that time, several DB cables had been cut. Rail traffic throughout Northwest Germany was halted for half a day. Even then, the perpetrators would have known very well what they had to do to cause as much damage as possible. (see)