On the evening of Oct. 14, the managing director of Shefa, a Faroese Telecom subsidiary, received a call from one of his technicians: There was a fault on the cable connecting Shetland, an archipelago 100 miles off the coast of Scotland, to the Faroes. Days later, just after midnight on Oct. 20, Pall Hojgaard Vesturbu got a second call: Another cable between Shetland and the UK mainland was damaged.
Together, the faults severely disrupted telephone and internet communication on the islands and stopped shops from taking credit card payments for a day.
It was less than a month after the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, and Western governments had identified subsea cables as a potential target for state-sponsored sabotage. But Vesturbu had another culprit in mind: the fishing industry. “It’s frustrating,” he says, noting that fishing vessels have caused almost all the ruptures to his company’s cables. “The locations of our cables are sent to boats’ navigating equipment, so it should be an automatic process to avoid sailing across the cables. Most of the sailors pay attention to the cables.”
