Did you receive one of the out-of-place text messages last week?

Did you get a random text last week that seemed out of the blue? You weren’t alone, because almost 170,000 other people also got them.

Some received messages wishing them a Happy Valentine’s Day, in November. Others got random phrases like “Right They need metal detectors” at 2 a.m., or even a text from an ex at 4 a.m. The messaging debacle made news stations across the country as people spent the day trying to confirm with family, friends, bosses, coworkers, and any others that may have sent or received the messages.

Courtesy of GIPHY

It turns out it was a fluke in the system of a telecom vendor named Syniverse, a third-party service provider to several of the major telecommunications providers.

According to the company, a server failed back in February and left the unsent messages in a queue. The server was reactivated on November 7 and the messages were sent out. The issue has since been resolved and no more lingering messages are expected to be sent.

Syniverse is still working on how many texts were sent to understand the full scope of the incident. Unsent text messages are usually attempted to be delivered multiple times then deleted 24 to 72 hours later if they cannot be delivered depending on the mobile carrier. The company is looking into why this did not happen for the batch of messages that were not delivered on February 14, 2019.

The company released this statement in an official press release:

“We apologize to anyone who was impacted by this occurrence,” said William Hurley, Chief Marketing and Product Officer, 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.”

Courtesy of GIPHY

Did you receive or unknowingly send any of these text messages? We did, and, of course, the sender of the messages denied having any idea what their phone had been up to, so it was certainly a relief to hear that we were not going nuts. Share with us any weird messages that you got and what they may have caused in the comments.