A bizarre digital incident has stirred alarm in the Baltic Sea. Dozens of NATO warships suddenly appeared on electronic maritime maps-vessels that, in reality, were scattered across other parts of the globe. The Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported the strange event, citing the country’s Transport and Communications Agency, Traficom.

According to the publication, maritime tracking services were flooded with false signals on Monday, creating the illusion that the Baltic was teeming with military vessels. In truth, most of them were operating thousands of kilometers away. One example cited was a Spanish naval ship that appeared to be cruising in the Gulf of Finland while officially traveling between Somalia and Japan.

Traficom traced the glitch to an AIS (Automatic Identification System) receiver station in Parainen, which normally handles a few dozen signals per hour from nearby vessels in the Archipelago Sea. During the malfunction, the station registered nearly 18,000 transmissions in a single hour.

Agency representatives emphasized that the anomaly affected only commercial monitoring services and not government-operated tracking systems. Aleksi Uttula, head of maritime surveillance at Traficom, explained that the problem was purely technical and unrelated to any official observation networks.

Still, some experts suggest a more troubling explanation. Former Norwegian Navy officer and analyst Tord Are Iversen noted that such disruptions could point to cybersecurity vulnerabilities. He said the scale and precision of the incident make it noteworthy, though it remains unclear whether it was caused by equipment failure or deliberate interference.

The «ghost ship» phenomenon, while brief, underscores how fragile modern maritime data networks can be-and how easily they might be exploited or disrupted in an increasingly digital battlespace.