No sign of sabotage in Finland-Sweden power outage, operator says

The Baltic Sea region has been on high alert after a string of underwater power cable, ⁠telecom link and gas pipeline outages since Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, with sabotage and shipping accidents blamed for the incidents.

Tuesday's outage on the Fenno-Skan 2 interconnector appeared to have been caused by a malfunction at a substation, while the undersea cable section appeared to be unharmed, Fingrid spokesperson Jonne Jappinen said.

Sweden's Svenska kraftnat also ‌said ⁠the outage was caused by technical faults and that no police or any other law enforcement agencies were involved in the probe.

The outage on the 800 megawatt (MW) power ⁠line was expected to last for around 18 hours, according to a regulatory statement published by Svenska kraftnat on the ⁠Nord Pool messaging platform.

"Our assessment is that Fenno-Skan will be operational again shortly," the Swedish company said ⁠in a statement to Reuters.