Henderson, N.C. — Five North Carolina counties were left without emergency phone service for several hours Friday after a cable was cut, authorities said.

Fire and police departments in Person, Granville, Franklin, Vance and Warren counties reported phone service was out late Friday morning.

A contractor for Time Warner Cable crew severed an Embarq cable near U.S. Highway 158 near Littleton, Time Warner spokeswoman Melissa Buscher said.

“One of our large contractors was there laying conduit for cable and cut the Embarq line. We regret the accident happened and are fully investigating how it happened,” Buscher said.

An unrelated cable cut between Henderson and Franklin Fiday morning disrupted the redundancy Embarq built into the lines to minimize the prospect of service disruption, company spokesman Tom Matthews said.

Service was restored to all affected areas by about 3:30 p.m., Matthews said. As many as 45,000 lines were affected by the outage, he said.