The power lines, the phone lines, and the cable tv lines are all strung on the same poles, or same type of poles. Why do they never go out at the same time?
And during a big storm, how can the cable and electricity go out, but not the phone? In fact, I have never, EVER lost my phone service. Why not? Yet I lose cable service at least 5 times a year, and power at least 3 times a year, but never the phone. (and yes, I do check because when the power or cable goes out I pick up the phone to call and complain).
The local loop phone system is quite robust and has several redundancies. The local switch buildings have backup power to provide the battery voltaagee to your set and are massively built to be earthquake resistant.
Cable is quite intricate and has many active components such as inline amplifiers that often go out of tune or fail. Now that cable internet service is commonplace it has the added complexity of having signals sent in two directions. When I worked at Biosphere 2 we had an early cable modem system that kept an engineer busy full time just keeping the campus operating.
Utilities (phone, power, cable) are not always on poles and often are not on the same poles. Often times you will see power poles on one side of the street and telephone poles on the other. These companies often prefer to be on different right-of-ways if they can get them and if it is cost effective. In any case, it is usually not a “pole” problem.
Padeye is right. Power and cable lines have intervening elements along their paths that can easily be damaged by lightning (transformers, repeaters). Most phone lines in the US have no need of repeaters since they are close enough to the central office to maintain good signal (voltages) to the phone and back. In these cases, the phone is powered by the switch at the central office which is on commercial power and always backed up by batteries and/or generators. A cut wire due to pole damage or damage to buried cable (wire) will take out phone service, though.