Powercor workers determined the fault at 8.08am was most likely caused by a bird flying into the Koroit 22,000-volt feeder, putting 2694 customers offline.

A Powercor spokesman said a similar incident would usually cause lights to flicker, but safety measures in place due to maintenance work caused the longer outage.

According to the electricity supplier’s outage map, there were 2283 customers affected at Port Fairy (a town often hit by power outages), 200 in the Tower Hill area, 126 at Illowa, 65 at Rosebrook and 36 in Dennington.