SoftBank Corp. has mistakenly deleted about 10.3 million emails that were supposed to be sent to about 4.36 million users of its mobile phones, the carrier announced on Friday.
According to SoftBank, the failure was caused by a malfunction in the company's filtering system, which automatically sorts out spam emails and blocks their delivery.
The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry told SoftBank on Friday to provide its users with sufficient explanation for the failure, as the ministry regards it as a serious incident under the Regulations for Enforcement of the Telecommunications Business Law.
The failure lasted for 22 hours and 28 minutes, from 10:48 a.m. on Sept. 17 through to 9:16 a.m. the following day, according to SoftBank. Some emails sent from domain names that included ".co.jp" were mistakenly considered spam and automatically deleted.
The ministry also called on the company to give a report on the cause of the incident and measures it will take to prevent a recurrence.
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