Dawesville residents have spent the past few days dealing with a significant Telstra outage that affected mobile reception and internet services across Florida, Melros and surrounding streets. The disruption lasted several days and caused widespread frustration, especially for people relying on mobile data for work, health appointments and safety.

While Telstra did not issue a suburb specific public statement, the company responded to residents through its outage checker and customer support channels. These replies confirm the outage was substantial, but the exact cause has not been officially released.

What Telstra Told Residents

Residents who contacted Telstra received variations of the following messages:

• There is an issue affecting services in your area.
• Our technicians are working to restore services as soon as possible.
• We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
• There is a network outage impacting mobile and internet services.
• Estimated restoration time has been extended.

These messages indicate a major fault rather than a routine interruption. Multi day outages usually point to physical damage, a backhaul failure or a site that technicians cannot access immediately.

Local Reports of Vandalism

Some residents reported hearing that vandalism at a local tower may have contributed to the outage. This has not been confirmed by Telstra. However, the length of the disruption and the pattern of service loss are consistent with physical damage to infrastructure.

In previous incidents across WA, vandalism has caused similar multi day outages by damaging power supply, fibre backhaul or equipment cabinets at tower sites. This does not confirm that vandalism occurred in Dawesville, but it explains why the rumour circulated quickly.

Why the Outage Lasted So Long

Telstra outages that stretch over several days usually involve:

• damage to cabling or backhaul links
• faults at the tower that require physical replacement of equipment
• restricted access to the site for safety reasons
• coordination between Telstra and NBN Co for shared infrastructure

These factors can significantly delay repairs, especially in coastal areas where coverage overlaps are limited and a single tower carries most of the load.