A cut phone line may have been to blame for an outage that left some Freeborn County customers without local or long-distance service Tuesday afternoon.

The Law Enforcement Center received many calls about the service outage, which started around 3 p.m. Tuesday. Customers of McLeod USA local phone service were without a dial tone for several hours, and those who have McLeod long distance could not place long-distance calls.

A McLeod operator said the company’s service technicians worked on the problem Tuesday afternoon, but could provide no details on when the problem was fixed.

A Qwest operator said she had not heard of any outages for Qwest customers in the area.