Businesses across the region said the outage was triggered about 10.30am and restored 4.30pm. 

A Powercor spokesperson confirmed the outage was caused by a fault in a regulator with 975 customers affected.

The spokesperson said the outage started at 12.15pm and was restored by 3.34pm.

Halls Gap and Grampians Visitor Information Centre’s Jason Meehan said the outage caused problems for people throughout the town. 

“Technologically it’s not great,” he said. 

“In cafes and shops there are things you can’t produce.

“We were in the dark with the doors open still trying to advise people.”

Mr Meehan said in the modern world serving customers in any business is reliant on technology of some kind. 

“We can’t research for people,” he said. 

“If they ask about something out of town or something different we can’t help like we normally do.

“It’s hard to take money or even charge people – our eftpos was down.”