Got a Weird Text? Verizon’s Vendor Is to Blame
If you woke up to a weird text that seemed totally out of place, you aren’t alone. A mysterious wave of missives swept America’s phones overnight, delivering confusing messages from friends, family, and the occasional ex.
Friends who hadn’t talked to each other in months were jolted into chatting.
A telecom vendor called Syniverse said a server failed on Feb. 14, and nearly messages from multiple carriers didn’t go through.
Is anyone else having a serious surge of robocalls and spam messages on their cellphone lately?
— Simon Ostler (@SimonOstler) November 7, 2019
Syniverse initially estimated about 170,000 messages, but the company now says it’s higher, without saying how many.
The sudden release of messages sometimes had a dramatic effect.
Stephanie Bovee, a 28-year-old from Portland, Oregon, woke up at 5 a.m. to a text from her sister that said just “omg.”
She started calling everyone.
She woke up her mom, freaking her out.
It was three hours before she learned that everything was fine and the text was an odd anomaly.
“Now it’s funny,” she said.
Bovee figured out that people were getting some of her old texts that failed to go through when her sister and a co-worker both got texts that she had sent in February.

Marissa Figueroa, a 25-year-old from Turlock, California, got an unwanted message from an ex she had stopped talking to — and then he got one from her as well.
Figueroa couldn’t figure it out, even worrying that her ex was messing with her until she saw reports of this happening to others.
“It didn’t feel great,” she said.
A friend who’d just re-entered his life got a mystifying message from Joseph Gomez at 5:32 a.m. Thursday.
It took a half-hour of back-and-forth texting and help from a screenshot to clear up the situation.
No mixed messages there.