Optus: Telecoms company sent emails to wrong addresses during deadly outage

The outage in Australia has been linked to four deaths as people could not reach emergency services.

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Optus' emails also underplayed the severity of the 18 September outage, which has been linked to four deaths, including that of an eight-week old baby, as people could not reach emergency services.

The first email was sent at 14:45 that day, and a second one seven minutes later to say it had been fixed and 10 calls were affected. In fact, more than 600 calls to emergency services had failed, over 13 hours.

Authorities only learnt about the outage the next afternoon, more than 36 hours after it began, from the industry regulator.

"That communication... was sent to the wrong address, which we have told industry a number of times is not to be used as a source for notification," Australia's Deputy Secretary for Communications James Chisholm said in parliament on Wednesday.