The federal government only learned about Optus’ deadly triple-zero outage the day after it happened because the telecommunications provider sent a notification email to the wrong address.

Optus was required by regulation to notify the Department of Communications about the emergency call outage, which was linked to three deaths, on Thursday September 18.

The Singapore-owned telco sent two emails to the department on the day, one at 2.45pm notifying about the outage and another at 2.52pm advising the matter had been resolved, department deputy secretary for communications and media James Chisholm said.

But the emails were sent to a redundant address, meaning the department didn’t learn about the outage until it was called by regulator the Australian Communications and Media Authority

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