High voltage undersea cable being laid into water. (Prysmian Group)
Two separate cables in the Submarine Cable Protection Zone off Perth had both experienced faults in short succession over the weekend.
The cables are vital for international communications between Australia and the rest of the world.
The cables' owner, Subco, is urging the Australian Federal Police to investigate.
Two subsea cables off the coast of Perth, vital for international communications, suffered a fault over the weekend, and the company that owns them urgently wants to know what happened.
The chief executive of the cable company Subco, Bevan Slattery, wrote on LinkedIn yesterday that two separate cables in the Submarine Cable Protection Zone off Perth had both experienced faults "straight after each other and in close proximity to each other".
His post further said that it was a concerning development and called for the Australian Federal Police to investigate urgently.
David Brewster, senior research fellow at the National Security College at the Australian National University, told Nadia Mitsopoulos on 102.5 ABC Perth that the international cables that link Australia to the world are vital.
"Australia has 16 subsea cables that carry 99 per cent of our international communications," Dr Brewster said.
"It's really fundamental to the Australian economy and our daily life, and if they were to be disrupted or cease, it would have a massive impact on our country.
Undersea cables lie on the ocean floor, are about the width of a garden hose and can be easily cut by accident, by ship's anchors.
"We've seen numerous incidents in Europe and around Taiwan over the last, say, three or four years of cables being cut," he said.
"It's difficult to be absolutely certain of the reasons in some of these cases, but in a great number of cases, it's fairly obvious that they were done by state actors, Russia and China."
A network of subsea cables link world communications. (Wikimedia Commons)
In this case, the cables that were damaged inside the Perth Cable Protection Zone, which extends 60 nautical miles off City Beach, to a depth of 2,000 metres and one nautical mile each side of the cables.