Finland Times

The cable connection to Sweden was cut during a land removal work at Lohja, northwest of Helsinki, said the report quoting national radio Yle.

Elisa is also using a domestic brand name Saunalahti.

A backup connection via Tallinn, Estonia, was insufficient and many customers could not connect with servers abroad at all.

The outage began at 15:35 local time (1335 GMT). At 19:00 local time, Elisa said that repair work could continue for several hours and could be completed possibly by midnight local time.

Finnish dependence on internet connections via Sweden and partially via Estonia has been a subject of public debate now and then.

The Finnish government is backing a project to build a direct connection under the Baltic Sea from Finland to Germany. 20 million euros (25 million U.S. dollars) was earmarked for the project in an additional budget last May.

The state of Finland acquired a commercial company, Coronet Oy, to handle the project. Work to lay down the cable is to start in 2015.

Other Finnish operators than Elisa have not reported problems. Purely domestic use of internet has not been affected, but many popular services rely on servers abroad.

The network connections , however, was restored later, News Agency STT reported.

According to Elisa, internet traffic from Finland to Stockholm had slowed down due to the fault.

The problems was experienced by Elisa customers who attempted to visit foreign websites, however, internal traffic within the country had not been affected.