Mysterious telephone texts puzzle recipients, mobile companies will not explain / Boing Boing

An unknown number of mobile phone users in America received strange texts on the phone Wednesday.

No one is sure where they came from, but the problem seems to have been that a bunch of texts sent months ago were suddenly delivered months later. In some cases, long after a bad breakdown.

“Friends who had not talked to each other for months were cast to talk. Others panicked briefly, ”reports AP:

The best explanation seems to be that old texts sent in the spring suddenly went through. Two people said they found out that the original messages were never received. It is not clear why this months-long delay happened. Telephone companies blamed others and gave no further explanation.

Stephanie Bovee, a 28-year-old from Portland, woke up at 5am to a text from her sister saying "omg." She immediately thought that something had happened to her newborn nephew in the hospital.

She started calling everyone. The sister and the sister's husband did not answer. She woke her mother, and cheated on her. It was three hours before she learned that everything was fine and the text was a strange anomaly.

"It's fun now," she said. "But out of context, it wasn't cool."

A Sprint spokesperson told a reporter that a "maintenance platform" for messaging platforms at several US carriers was to blame, and T-Mobile called it a "third-party vendor problem." Verizon and AT&T would not answer the reporter's questions.

People marveled by peculiar texts, and no one can say why [apnews.com, photo: pexels]

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