Australian telecom sent alert to wrong emails during deadly outage

Australian telecom giant Optus mistakenly sent critical outage alerts to the wrong government email address during last month's nationwide network failure, parliament was told on Wednesday.

The revelation emerged during a Senate estimates hearing, where officials from the Department of Infrastructure confirmed the emails, sent at 2.45 pm and 2.52 pm local time on Sept. 18, were sent to the wrong public service email address, where they sat undetected for more than a day, according to ABC News.

Optus initially said it had detected and then fixed a triple-0 outage that affected 10 calls; however, it later emerged that 600 calls had failed and three people had died.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority is investigating whether Optus breached the law.

Last month, two outages disrupted services for thousands of Australians, with the first incident linked to three deaths after customers were unable to access emergency assistance in time.

Optus is owned by Singtel, which is a major telecommunications company based in Singapore.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he also raised and discussed the outage of Optus with his Singaporean counterpart, Lawrence Wong.

"Yes, it was discussed. I raised the issue, and we had a discussion. I thank Prime Minister Wong for the condolences that he offered to the families and his support for strong follow-up action," he told reporters during a joint news conference with Wong in Canberra.

On his part, Wong said the company Optus and its parent company Singtel operate commercially, but he expects them to behave responsibly and to comply with domestic laws wherever they operate.