If you got a random text message in the middle of the night, you're not alone.
Lots of people in the U.S. are reporting today that they received a strange text message in the middle of the night. People on Twitter and Reddit say that they woke up to a text message that the sender claims that they didn't actually send. There are reports of this issue happening to customers on both Android and iPhone devices across all major U.S. carriers.
The mysterious text messages appear to have been originally sent around February 14th, 2019. As noted by The Verge, the recipients never got the text back then but randomly received it this morning.
It appears that a hiccup in a cross-carrier messaging system is to blame for this problem. Sprint says that a "maintenance update" caused the problem but that it was resolved shortly after, while T-Mobile has placed the blame on a "third party vendor" but also says that the problem has been fixed. U.S. Cellular also tells 92 Moose that the issue with the cross-carrier messaging system has been taken care of.
It could definitely be weird and even a little unsettling to receive a random text message from a loved one in the middle of the night that they don't remember sending. What's worse, it could traumatic for some folks who received a message from a loved one who has since passed away.
Did you get a random text message overnight as a result of this glitch?
UPDATE: A report from Quartz sheds more light on what happened. Syniverse is a third-party vendor that provides text message services for several carriers, and a spokesman for the company says that 168,149 texts that were previously undelivered were accidentally sent out.
"We apologize to anyone who was impacted by this occurrence," said William Hurley, Chief Marketing Officer at Syniverse. "While the issue has been resolved, we are in the process of reviewing our internal procedures to ensure this does not happen again, and actively working with our customers’ teams to answer any questions they have."