Many protection applications are based upon the Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) technology. Therefore, PMUs have been increasingly widespread throughout the power network, and there are several researches have been made to locate the PMUs for complete system observability. This paper introduces an important application of PMUs in power system protection which is the detection of single line outage. In addition, a detection of the out of service line is achieved depending on the variations of phase angles measured at the system buses where the PMUs are located. Hence, a protection scheme from unexpected overloading in the network that may lead to system collapse can be achieved. Such detections are based upon an artificial intelligence technique which is the support Vector Machine (SVM) classification tool. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, the algorithm is tested using offline simulation for both the 14-bus IEEE and the 30-bus IEEE systems. Two different kernels of the SVM are tested to select the more appropriate one (i.e. polynomial and Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernels are used).