If you received a weird text message in the middle of the night Wednesday, you sure aren’t alone.
Hundreds of people have reported that they received mysterious text messages Wednesday from friends and family members. The catch? The messages were supposed to be delivered in February. Many of the texts were sent on Valentine’s Day. Awkward much?
Twenty-year old Stephanie Bovee told ABC that she woke up at 5 a.m. to a text message from her sister that read “omg.” Bovee assumed that something had happened to her newborn nephew and began calling family members in a frenzy. Three long hours later, she realized that she was just one of the many people to receive outdated text messages.
"Now it's funny," she said. "But out of context, it was not cool."
“It was a punch in the gut. Honestly I thought I was dreaming, and for a second I thought she was still here,” the Twitter user is quoted as saying by Verge. “The last few months haven’t been easy, and just when I thought I was getting some type of closure, this just ripped open a new hole.”
— KuribHoe (@FU_GaryOak) November 7, 2019
— Lynn Craig (@LynnJCraig) November 7, 2019
To make matters even stranger, the phone companies don’t seem to have a great explanation for the mishap.
Third-party text platform Syniverse said that 168,149 previously undelivered messages were sent this week to its subscribers due to IT maintenance.
“We apologize to anyone who was impacted by this occurrence,” commented William Hurley, Syniverse’s chief marketing and product officer, the Washington Post reported. “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.”
A Sprint spokesperson said in a statement that the issue was caused by a “maintenance update,” CBS reported.
T-Mobile claimed that the incident was caused by a third-party vendor issue and had been resolved. Verizon and AT&T have not yet issued any statements on the matter.
