Research in 2021: around 60% of undersea internet cable faults were caused by fishing equipment or anchors; repairs can often cost $250K to $3M per incident
On the evening of Oct. 14, the managing director of Shefa, a Faroese Telecom subsidiary, received a call from one of his technicians … Tweets: @athomson6 , @oliviasolon , and @oliviasolon Tweets: Amy Thomson / @athomson6 : “It's not as James Bond as you think. You don't need to use specialized equipment,” he says. “All you need is a vessel, and you just drag an anchor, and the cable is gone.” by @oliviasolon and @mhbergen https://www.bloomberg.com/... Olivia Solon / @oliviasolon : After Nord Stream, western governments freaked out about the prospect of sabotage to undersea internet cables. But cable operators say that it's actually fishing equipment & anchors to blame for cable damage most of the time. My latest for @BW https://www.bloomberg.com/... Olivia Solon / @oliviasolon : Fishing crews, however, say their fishing grounds and livelihoods are being squeezed by subsea cable operators and offshore wind companies installing so many more cables they have to navigate around. https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
After Nord Stream, western governments braced for James Bond-style attacks on the internet's physical layer. Bloomberg's reporting on the late-night call that reached Shefa, Faroese Telecom's cable subsidiary, argues the real threat is far duller: 2021 research ties roughly 60% of undersea cable faults to fishing equipment or anchors, with each repair running $250,000 to $3 million.
Coverage since then keeps confirming the mundane pattern — US and European officials judged the recent Baltic Sea cable damage likely maritime accidents rather than Russian sabotage — while the system's spare capacity stays thin: only 22 of 77 cable ships are designated for repair across roughly 800,000 miles of cable, and the cables that fell into a nearly 3,000-foot canyon off West Africa showed how long restoration drags even with no attacker involved.
First-order effects
- Shefa and operators like Faroese Telecom absorb the repair bills directly — up to $3 million per incident — plus the outage exposure on routes their subscribers depend on.
- Fishing crews say subsea cable operators and offshore wind developers laying more lines are squeezing their grounds, so each new route tightens the competition for sea space.
Second-order effects
- Hyperscalers that own or lease cable capacity inherit both the downtime and the scrutiny: US officials have already warned Google, Meta and others about tampering concerns involving China-owned repair vessels (repair-ship vetting), and every anchor strike feeds that review.
- Each fault queues behind a fleet sized for routine wear — 22 repair-designated ships for the global network — meaning simultaneous incidents anywhere, from anchors to canyon drops, stretch restoration times for everyone downstream.
Third-order effects
- If accidents dominate the fault ledger, the durable policy answer shifts from counter-sabotage patrols toward route redundancy, insurance pricing, and traffic-management rules around cable corridors — though whether regulators treat fishing access and cable protection as compatible remains genuinely open.
- Because a dragged anchor and deliberate interference look identical on the seabed, attribution fights like the Baltic assessments risk becoming the default political response to every severed line, raising the cost of ambiguity for cable owners and coastal states alike.
The trend: As subsea cable networks expand through busy fishing waters, governments are confronting the fact that the leading threat is ordinary maritime activity, making repair capacity and route redundancy matter more than counterintelligence.