Phones stopped ringing mid-afternoon when about 72,000 Telstra customers lost the use of their landlines.

Telstra area general manager northern Victoria Steve Tinker said the incident was the result of a loss of AC mains power at the Albury exchange.

“The problem has affected calls into and out of Albury- Wodonga, but local calls are still possible,” he said last night.

“We have technicians on site to manually restore connections and we are continuing to see services being progressively restored.”

Meanwhile, a power pole in Guinea Street burst into flames at 10am, cutting off power to surrounding homes and businesses for about half an hour.

Almost 800 Essential Energy customers in the CBD were affected.

Community relations manager southern Karen Roscoe said network protection equipment activated to isolate supply to the area after detecting a fault on the local electricity network.

“Local crews were dispatched immediately and identified a fault with high voltage switching equipment on the overhead electricity network on the corner of Young and Guinea streets,” she said.

“Supply was restored to all customers within 15 minutes by back-feeding the power supply.”