Mystery text messages freaking out both recipients and senders.

Everyone has at least some fear or concern that their cell phone may be vulnerable to some form of hacking or cyber attack.

This past week, a number of people (168,149 to be exact) surely thought that may have been the case when odd text messages -from them- started showing up on other peoples’ phones.

Ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends, bosses, relatives, and others received a number of text messages this past Wednesday that were not sent by the person labeled as the sender. Or at least, not sent recently…

Apparently, a server managed by Syniverse, and used by ALL major cellular carriers, had a failure back in February, 2019, on Valentine’s Day no less. The failure went uncorrected until November 7 when it was brought back online. All the messages were then sent. “Better late than never” does not necessarily apply when it comes to texts.

We heard from a few investigators whose clients were very disturbed by the odd texts that either arrived from or were sent to their ex-partner, or other unsuspecting contact. Especially since the failure occurred on Valentine’s Day, one can imagine a number of the messages may have been intimate or at least personal in nature.

Freaked out users took to Twitter, Reddit, and other outlets trying to figure out what was going on.

CNN reported:

The text messages appear to have originally been sent on February 14, Valentine’s Day, but were received more than eight months later with Wednesday’s time stamp. The total number of messages sent due to what’s being called an “internal maintenance cycle” was 168,149, according to Syniverse, which provides technology and business services for a number of telecommunications companies.

The issue occurred across all four major carriers in the United States and affected both Apple and Android devices.

Syniverse responded:

“We apologize to anyone who was impacted by this occurrence,” said William Hurley, chief marketing and product officer at 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.”