Cloudflare, the Connectivity Cloud colossus, reckons the recent undersea internet cable damage events in the Baltic Sea have had “little-to-no observable impact.” Despite the sneaky suspected cable-cutting antics of what are considered Chinese/Russian entities, European internet infrastructure has proved resilient due to significant redundancy, according to pre- and post-damage observations.
It is easy to say ‘This is fine’ but Cloudflare has backed up its assertions with a series of graphs charting internet traffic volume and quality metrics spanning the cable sabotage events. Both the BCS East-West Interlink, connecting Lithuania and Sweden, and the C-Lion1 cable, between Finland and Germany, have been damaged to varying degrees in recent days.
Above, we have embedded a couple of sample charts for Germany, which we think illustrate Cloudflare’s point beautifully. The ‘internet quality’ measures seem to be the best illustration of the resilience of European internet infrastructure.
Most pleasingly, for Europeans, the key performance characteristics of the internet quality in Sweden, Lithuania, Finland, and Germany – such as available/used bandwidth and latency – seem to suffer from no adverse effects.
Cloudflare highlights that countries like Sweden have over 20 submarine cables landing on their shores. The coasts of Finland and Germany are also well served by redundancy, with 10 or so undersea cables each.
In conclusion, the Baltic trawling ne’er-do-wells have truly inflicted barely a scratch on the European internet infrastructure. The probable hostile actions are still very unwelcome. However, the same kind of cable-cutting skulduggery has previously been seen to be very effective when targeted against “a concentrated point of vulnerability, whether for an individual network provider, city/state, or country.” Luckily that didn’t happen in the Baltic bordering nations of Europe, this time.
Of course, a hostile actor could continue to sneakily chip away at internet cables traversing open seaways. Thankfully, the recent report about the Danish Navy boarding and detaining the ‘Chinese ship’ shows that affected nations aren’t scared to show their teeth. The security of a nation’s internet connectivity has been vital for decades now, and is probably not far behind supplies of civilization-essentials like food and energy.
