A Ton of People Received Text Messages Overnight That Were Originally Sent on Valentine's Day (theverge.com) 82
Something strange is happening with text messages in the US right now. Overnight, a multitude of people received text messages that appear to have originally been sent on or around Valentine's Day 2019. From a report: These people never received the text messages in the first place; the people who sent the messages had no idea that they had never been received, and they did nothing to attempt to resend them overnight. Delayed messages were sent from and received by both iPhones and Android phones, and the messages seem to have been sent and received across all major carriers in the US. Many of the complaints involve T-Mobile or Sprint, although AT&T and Verizon have been mentioned as well. People using regional US carriers, carriers in Canada, and even Google Voice also seem to have experienced delays. At fault seems to be a system that multiple cell carriers use for messaging. A Sprint spokesperson said a "maintenance update" last night caused the error.
To never be heard from again (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
How many people in a "ton"? Imperial ton, metric ton... inquiring minds would like to know.
It's not going to be more than about 20 though, so why is this headline news?
not that impressive (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:not that impressive (Score:5, Funny)
And the 5 guys on top of her
Re: (Score:2)
It only looks like 5 guys, really it is CowboyNeal.
11.43 (Score:2)
a ton of people is about 7 average Americans.
More like 11.43 adults.
Adult males average 191, females average 159, and they're close enough to equal numbers as doesn't matter, so 175 lb. Divide that into 2000 and round to two-and-a-squidge digits significance and you get 11.43 of 'em.
Re: (Score:1)
My friend got one from me that had been referencing president's day so that would have been right around Valentine's day.
Re: (Score:2)
How many people in a "ton"? Imperial ton, metric ton... inquiring minds would like to know.
It's not going to be more than about 20 though, so why is this headline news?
I received one of those texts last night, noticed it this morning.
replied , "looks like a mistext"
she was like "what?"
Then we exchanged screen shots, the text was missing from her side. she tracked it back to V-day.
Now i see this.
Re: (Score:2)
"Many" is the correct answer.
If you did want to get all pedantic about it then it's highly variable, ranging from around three people requiring fire brigade assistance to leave their bed to something in the region of 700 former denizens of a 1940s German holiday destination in Poland.
Re: (Score:3)
Call 1-800-law-guys you can sue for your loses do to divorce
Doublespeak (Score:5, Insightful)
A Sprint spokesperson said a "maintenance update" last night caused the error.
Sounds to me like the update fixed the error.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it caused the error. Without the "fix' nobody would have known about the problem, so it wouldn't have mattered.
I don't know if that's *really* what he meant, but that's sure how it sounded.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you implying that if an error happens on a computer in the deep woods and no one is around to witness it, it didn't really happen? :D
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In my experience, every time.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you implying that if an error happens on a computer in the deep woods and no one is around to witness it, it didn't really happen? :D
Code paths that were not reached, were not reached. That's true regardless of which instructions were decoded.
Re: (Score:1)
Exactly! The error happened 8 months and 3 weeks ago.
An Update last night? (Score:2)
So, Sprint says a maintenance update last night caused messages to be withheld eight months ago to be delivered today? I think TFA or TFS got something wrong...
Something fishy (Score:2)
Re:Something fishy (Score:4, Interesting)
I have definitely sent (and received) text messages that took days to get across, despite other messages with the same person being received promptly.
I suspect it has something to do with the fact that phone networks were never designed to handle text messages - as I recall they're piggybacking on a protocol designed for routine network status messages (hence the size limit) that get sent whenever unused bandwidth is available. As such, there's probably lots of buffers and black holes they can end up in with no-one the wiser - especially now that text messages potentially outnumber the legitimate status messages.
Re: (Score:2)
SMS is definitely a hack that should have never seen prime time. I wouldn't be surprised if the reality of the system is a convoluted as you say. It lacks pretty much all of the safeguards and quality of life features we take for granted in other protocols.
Timeshifted Love (Score:2)
Going to be some awkward conversations... (Score:1)
...for many couples tonight!
I wonder how many breakups that caused... (Score:1)
Seriously, I wonder how many fights and/or breakups that little snafu caused.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, I wonder how many fights and/or breakups that little snafu caused.
Which one, the lack of message delivery in February or the messages showing up in November? Or breakups since February or the ones happening after today?
I suppose it could be interesting either way... "You cad! I told you to NOT contact me again after Valentines day!" or "You cad! I told you not to contact her again, after Valentines Day!"
Re: (Score:2)
No-contact orders, dead people, lots of fun.
Re: (Score:2)
If things are that fragile, it was time.
A "Ton of People"? (Score:3)
How do they know the recipients' cumulative weight?
Re: (Score:1)
You seriously have to ask in today's culture of surveillance?
Of course your phone carriers know how much you weigh.
Re: (Score:2)
How do they know the recipients' cumulative weight?
Dude, that's like five Americans.
Re: (Score:3)
Short (2000lb), Long (2240lb), or metric?
Actually I think they need to abolish the metric ton (also spelled tonne) to be consistent with other units:
1000 Kilograms is a Megagram.
Re: (Score:2)
What is this? Someone else who knows how to use metric? Well, rossdee, good for you!
It's Skynet, Right? (Score:3)
A Sprint spokesperson said a "maintenance update" last night caused the error.
Last night's update caused a problem nine months ago. This is Skynet rebooting itself under it's own loader. I'd sell all the Bitcoin, but I'm afraid it's too late.
Re: (Score:2)
A Sprint spokesperson said a "maintenance update" last night caused the error.
Last night's update caused a problem nine months ago.
Obviously not. SMS messages are usually treated with the "must deliver" rule. It means that if the handset is not available, the SMS system stores the message until it can deliver the message. So what happened is some SMS messages didn't get delivered in February so they where stored on the SMS system waiting on getting delivered and a software bug was preventing further delivery attempts. They FIXED the bug so all of a sudden a pile of messages set aside in February were found, queued and delivered.
So
Emails Too (Score:2)
The difference between email and instant msg (Score:2)
And you discovered the difference between email and instant messaging. Email will keep trying, until it's told to give up. The same design that makes it keep trying also means it isn't instantaneous.
Wow, having to explain this on /.... (Score:2)
...things re going downhill
What happens to a dick pic deferred (Score:5, Funny)
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Honestly this post sounded better in my head, but I'm hitting submit anyway.
+1 Funny (Score:3)
Somebody +1 this. Oh where are moderator points when you need them
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. Yes it does.
dammit (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
I got a rock.
Re: (Score:2)
Probably for the best. Who uses SMS any more?
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Bah. Get off my lawn. We used US letters, phone calls, in person, telegrams, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm Gen X and prefer Signal or Hangouts. SMS doesn't support sending photos for free and since a picture says a 1000 words they are quite handy when you only have an on-screen touch keyboard.
The other nice thing about Hangouts is that it works on the desktop too. Like email.
Re: (Score:2)
warrantless wiretapping system malfunction? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Remember, the key to making you Constitution-shredding illegal warrantless eavesdropping system go unnoticed is to make sure it doesn't delay or alter the traffic being funneled through it. Whoops?
Yup. And there's something not-so-dismissive about text messages sent through damn near every major US cellular carrier, suddenly being re-transmitted all on the same day.
Either PRISM v2 just hiccuped, or some cat-stroking evil nerd at SPECTRE is giggling about their latest blackmail test...
Re: (Score:2)
Right, and this certainly proves they're not being deleted in any kind of sensible timeframe.
Re: (Score:1)
Happened to me. (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how many people got a text "from the grave."
Re: (Score:3)
A 'ton' of people (Score:2)
So roughly 12-15 people received them?
Re: (Score:2)
So roughly 12-15 people received them?
In the USA 12 people is defiantly a LONG ton.
Oh, that explains it (Score:3)
I was wondering about the flurry of "cease & desist" orders which were waiting for me this morning...
'Third Party Vendor'? More like Three Letter Org (Score:2)
I think you mean the NSA. Fixed it for ya.
I had this happen before. (Score:2)
I was driving, I got a text that said "Hey man I'm in town wanna hang out."
I called my friend, who lived 5 states away and said "Hell yeah lets hang out."
He replied "What... how... how'd you know I'm back?"
"You sent me a text message saying [original text]".
"I sent that LAST. YEAR." [when he came into town].
Somehow their phone system held a text message for an entire year and only delivered it when he came back into town.
probably gear from Mavenir (Score:5, Interesting)
Mavenir is a company with a weird and long history. But for the purposes of TFA and TFF, the relevant bits of technology come from ACISION, and trace their Lineage to Logica (Telepath) and CMG (HPS) SMS systems.
When logica and CMG fused, HPS was delcared the victor, but When HP aounced the discontinuation of VMS, they resurrected the Telepath. You see, the development of CMG's SMSC is close to dark arts, as is based on HPs "Industry Standard OpenVMS" OS and toolchain. Last time I checked, development was done in western europe. But I believe that nowadays, the main one is the telepath, based in HP-UX. Nonetheless, HPS is still mantained.
Those are the biggest SMS systems not comming from a Provider (Nokia, Huawei, et al).
Normaly, an operator assigns a "Lifetime" to an SMS (normal numbers range from 24 to 72 hours, depending on the capacity of your SMSCs, and ussage patterns of your users), the system retries for many days, with longer and longer intervals, after which it gives up. If an SMS is not delivered (say, becuase the owner had the phone of for 3 days), it is discarded and moved to a non-delivered pile. If the SMS goes from one operator to another (say, from T-Mo to Verizon) It goes from one SMSC to the other via CCS7 (SS7 in USoA), further complicating matters....
Probably, non-delivered messages on valentine's day (probably non delivered because excesss load in the Network AND servers) got stuck in limbo, long past their due date, not flagged as undeliverable, not delivered, but not moved to the Discarded repo either.
At some point, this maintenance update took those messages out of limbo, but instead of moving them to the discarded pile, sent them instead.
This is only an educated guess, from a guy who worked 5 years in a telecoms operator, the last three of them as the head of operations of "Value added services", which included SMS. At some point I had 2 Nokia SMSCs, one Telepath and one 3-Node HPS (later upgraded to 5 nodes) .
But again, this is only an (educated) guess. Only time will tell what happeded there.
Re: (Score:2)
If this is true, I've just learned something new. thanks
Re: (Score:1)
first part of your 4th paragraph is generally accurate. Non-delivered pile doesn't exist AFAIK (when message is discarded, it will be logged in the same manner as delivered message). I don't know about their deployment (they may always use homerouting) , but usually, unless the message is sent internationally, message will be delivere
Re: (Score:2)
thanks for the clarifications. I've been away from telco for a while (mostly doing openstack cloud infrastructure now), so my info msy be a tad stale
The Mail (Score:2)
always gets through...
9 month delivery is quite normal (Score:3)
If it was one week late, the baby would have come before the message!
That Russian Eagle did it (Score:2)
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Better late... (Score:2)
... than never. ;)
On the plus side (Score:2)
If you just got busted by your girlfriend for receiving a sexy text, you now have plausible deniability.
Valentine's day txts (Score:1)
Strangely, not a single Slashdotter has been affected by this issue.
Timing is interesting (Score:2)
Valentine's Day is almost exactly nine months before the release of the texts. I wonder how many Valentine babies are/are not due to be born in the next week or so because certain important messages were not received.
No Joke (Score:1)