Got A Weird Text? Carriers Explain Messaging Glitch

If you woke up last Thursday (Nov. 7) to a weird text from someone, or if someone texted you that you sent them a weird message, then you are not alone.

People across the country woke up to weird, misplaced, and “this does not make sense” kind of text messages from friends, family, or even exes.

As it turns out, this is a result of a network glitch that made unsent or unreceived messages from way back in February of this year get sent out and delivered to people.

One example is that of Stephanie Bovee, a 28-year-old from Portland, who got a text message from her sister that simply said “omg,” the Associate Press reported. Worried that something bad might have happened, she made phone calls. By the time she realized the issue, she ended up just laughing it off.

“Now it’s funny,” she said. “But out of context, it was not cool,” the AP reported.

In an official statement that was released to Gizmodo, third-party vendors Sprint and Syniverse offered an explanation as to why this situation happened. Sprint said that this is due to a “maintenance update” for messaging platforms across the country.

“A maintenance update occurred to part of the messaging platforms of multiple carriers in the U.S., including Sprint, which caused some customers to have older text messages sent to their devices,” Sprint explained.

“During an internal maintenance cycle last (Nov. 6) night, 168,149 previously undelivered text messages were inadvertently sent to multiple mobile operators’ subscribers,” said William Hurley, Chief Marketing and Product Officer for Syniverse. “We apologize to anyone who was impacted by this occurrence.”

Syniverse also assured customers that in additon to fixing this, they will work on making sure that such confusion will never happen again. “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.”

T-Mobile simply explained that this is a “third-party vendor issue.” Carriers Verizon and AT&T did not issue any statement on the issue.