Power failure

Yesterday my next door neighbour lost power as did other neighbouring properties, but not all - we didn't lose power.

Anyone have an idea how this can be?

The supply company said it was an official outage, but no-one had any notification.

Different local loop? Two of our neighbours are one a different circuit to us and the others (ours come up our road, theirs from behind their house), we once had a cut when there was a problem with a distributor box and they didn't.

Did they forget to pay the bill?

No, it was planned.

They planned to not pay the bill? That doesn't seem very wise.