Imagine receiving a text from your Valentines day date 9 months later.
Over the past couple of days, something rather strange (even for US standards) happened. Over 100,000 people across the USA received random text messages, but it’s not the normal kind of random texts. The messages appear to have originally been sent on Valentine’s day 2019.
Now, this wasn’t a strictly Apple or strictly Android occurrence, or even one unique to a specific carrier in the US. The issue affected users of both kinds of devices across all carriers. Suffice to say, recipients of these messages were pretty freaked out.
Imagine, a full 9 months on since February, and you receive a text from that one girl you spent Valentine’s day with. Not exactly the best thing to wake up to, I’d say. Reactions to these seemingly random texts vary from confusion and awkwardness to some pretty distressing emotions. According to Twitter, there were cases where people had received text messages from an ex-boyfriend or best friend who had already passed away. The memories that come flooding back from that one random text is all too real.
I just got a text from my bestfriends phone only issue is she’s been dead since February
— KuribHoe (@FU_GaryOak) November 7, 2019
Just when I thought that hole was slowing filling up and I was doing okay
— KuribHoe (@FU_GaryOak) November 7, 2019
So what on earth actually happened here? It turns out that a company named Syniverse is to blame for the mishap. Apparently this whole mess was the fault of a single server failure that occurred on the 14th of February, which trapped the aforementioned messages until November 7th, when the server was brought back online. The company published a note claiming that 168,149 delayed messages had been sent.
It’s rather sad to think that these people never received the text messages in the first place. Those who sent the messages probably just assumed the recipients never replied. The next time you send that risky text and get nothing, it could just be that your message was never sent, so chin up buddy.
