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.