Senate Hearing Focuses on Missed Emails During Deadly Optus 000 Outage

Questioning in Senate Estimates revealed the government had not noticed two notification emails sent to a casually monitored inbox.

The Optus company sign is displayed in a store window in the central business district in Sydney, Australia, on Sept. 23, 2025. Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

The whereabouts of two emails related to the September Optus telephone outage that impacted emergency calls and led to three deaths dominated Senate Estimates on Oct. 8.

On Sept. 18, Optus conducted a network firewall upgrade that resulted in the emergency phone number 000 being inaccessible in parts of South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory.

Three people died after not being able to contact emergency services to seek help.

During the course of the hearing, it was found the government had received two emails, seven minutes apart, regarding the outages on the afternoon of Sept. 18.

However, the emails went unnoticed until the next day at around 3:30 p.m. when contacted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

It was only then the government went looking to see if contact had been made, discovering the notifications in another inbox.

James Chishold, deputy secretary of the Department of Communications, told the hearing that the emails had been sent to an address that was no longer used for giving notifications of outages, and was only occasionally monitored.

Chisholm maintained that the timing of the government being notified would not have changed the situation that unfolded.

Optus had sent 272 other notifications to the correct email address—making the two emails in question outliers.

“We found that email when we were made aware of the major outage, because we receive a number of notifications about outages that are resolved very quickly,” Chisholm said.

Questioning delved into how often the government was monitoring the email address that received the initial notice, or whether any system had been set up to advise that the particular email address was no longer being used for such purposes.

Specific questions were also asked around when the older email address stopped being used as a primary contact and how many of the 272 notifications were in regard to 000 outages.

No clear answers could be given, at the moment, on those queries.

Questions critical of the government’s handling of the situation were directed largely by Nationals Senator James McGrath, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, and Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson.

Kathless Silleri, the assistant aecretary of Emergency Communications and Resilience, told the hearing the older email address that had been contacted were not defunct, but had been discontinued as an emergency notification point.

“It was being used for a couple of different purposes,” she said.

“As of the first of July, new notification requirements came in on telcos, and so we were receiving a lot more notifications of a particular type so we needed to establish a separate email address that was notified to all the telcos, including Optus, who have been using the correct email address for every other outage except the one on the 18th.”

But some senators remained sceptical of the government’s handling of its communications, with Senator McGrath saying the government had “failed to give correct advice to stakeholders”—a claim Chisholm denied.

Chisholm said the correct email address for advising of outages was openly available on his department’s website and that telcos had been notified.

Criticism in Parliament

Shadow communications spokeswoman Melissa McIntosh attempted an unsuccessful motion in parliament on Oct. 8 that would have established a parliamentary committee to examine the emergency call system.

Meanwhile, shadow communications spokeswoman Anne Webster criticised her ministerial counterpart Anika Wells, saying the public had been misled on how much and how quickly the government knew about the September outages.

But Wells rejected the assumption the government was holding back on admitting it had not known about the outages on the day.

“This issue is not about emails,” she said.

“Hopefully we can all agree about that.

“This is fundamentally about Optus’s failure to manage its network and to meet its legal obligations. My job as minister is to improve this system to work for Australians and to deliver maximum safety and public confidence.”

An Optus spokesperson told The Epoch Times that all matters were taken extremely seriously and would be handled with full transparency and accountability.

“The independent review led by Dr. Kerry Schott, is examining all the relevant correspondence, timelines, and processes,” the spokesperson said.

“Dr. Schott’s report is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

“In the interests of respecting the integrity of the independent review process and the ACMA investigation, we will not pre-empt the findings.”

Optus Fined $12 Million in 2024

The September incident was not the first time that access to emergency services failed under Optus, which is owned by Singapore-based Singtel.

In 2024, the company was fined $12 million for breaches of emergency call rules after an ACMA investigation.

It was discovered that during the course of the outage, Optus had failed to provide access to emergency calls to 2,145 people and had missed 369 subsequent welfare checks on customers who had attempted to access 000.

“Triple Zero availability is the most fundamental service telcos must provide to the public. When an emergency call fails to connect there can be devastating consequences for public health and safety,” ACMA Chair Nerida O'Loughlin said at the time.