If you’re wondering why Monday afternoon felt unusually quiet in Brussels, you can thank Belgacom, the Belgian telecoms group which provides the phone lines to the European institutions.

For five hours starting at lunchtime, all lines at the European parliament and the Commission, the EU’s executive arm, were severely disrupted, apparently blocking incoming calls from landlines and some mobiles.

An internal e-mail blamed “an incident on the network of one of the Commission external telephony providers”.

It took until 17:33 for a follow-up notification to advise the matter had been settled by Belgacom, a mostly-state-owned Belgian utility that, perhaps not surprisingly, is not known for its customer service.

“Did anything happen?” asked a devious Commission official, who admitted he hadn’t noticed until about four o’clock that something was amiss.

Mobile phones and e-mail continued to work, however, meaning it wasn’t a completely wasted day in the European capital.

The European Central Bank has emerged from the financial crisis as one of the few institutions with its reputation intact – and its powers greatly enhanced – so a job on its governing council is a pretty good gig by any measure.

One is coming up in June, when Austrian economist Gertrude Tumpel-Gugerell is leaving after eight years at the top table. She’s one of the six executive board members at the ECB, and as such also sits on the rate-setting governing council alongside the 17 governors of the national banks whose countries use the euro.

Two candidates have been put forward to replace her: Peter Praet, 61, a well-regarded director of the Belgian central bank for the past decade; and Elena Kohutikova, 57, a former Slovak national bank deputy governor and now an economist at Vseobecna Uverova Banka, a unit of Italy’s Intesa SanPaolo.