Extreme weather batters in Australia state of Victoria
Videos posted online showed torrential rain and gale-force winds uprooting trees and blowing entire sheds away.
The wild weather has also hampered efforts to fight huge bushfires in the state's west.
A catastrophic fire weather warning has been issued in one region - Australia's highest level of bushfire danger.
The state's energy minister, Lily D'Ambrosio, said Tuesday's power blackout was one of the largest in Victoria's history.
"At the peak, 529,000 were without power due to physical damage to power lines caused by extreme weather," she said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The outages happened after a number of transmission towers collapsed in the storm - forcing a power station to shut down.
There was also widespread disruption to transport in Melbourne, with half of the city's train lines being suspended.
Public Transport Victoria (PTV) said it had been forced to shut many lines down due to multiple reports of storm damage.
Severe weather warnings were issued by the Bureau of Meteorology but most of them were later cancelled.
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