Friday, 29 November 2019

Love Don't Live Here Anymore

Take a trip back in time ...

Lawyer Going back In Time
Going back In Time - Can't Always Correct Things .....

.... maybe to last February or even further back.

Now imagine that way back then you sent a phone text message to a loved one .... or even a hated one. You got no responses, and didn't bother to chase up to see if they received them. Why would you .... Its a text right? What could go wrong?

Now lets come suddenly back to the present day .... would you want to resend that particular message to that recipient again? Possibly yes if its to a loved one, but maybe not if the relationship has since ended. In fact there are many reasons why you might not want to resend the messages, and similarly not necessarily re-receive a message from the past. But hey, its a text right? That could never happen right?

Old Texts
Old Texts Don't Always Make Sense

Wrong. It can and does happen now again. For instance on Wednesday the 6th of November, 2019, all customers of all major carriers in the US, whether on Android or iPhone devices suddenly received text messages that had apparently been sent to them on Valentines Day 2019, eight months ago and  carrying Wednesday's time stamp.The messages had apparently never been received having been sent.

Of course much confusion, embarrassment and even anger then ensued. Complaints came in thick and fast:
  • Some complained about awkward messages being sent to their ex-partners, or equally, of having received awkward messages from their ex-partners. 
  • Others were left upset after receiving messages from a relative or friend who had since passed away. 
  • The majority were just confused by their receipt, or the belated responses to these ancient messages.

All in all, 168,149 customers were affected by the incident. However most complained to the wrong people. All phone carriers use back office third parties to handle the infrastructure .... in this case the fault lay with Syniverse, which provides services for many major telecommunications companies.

It apologised and gave the following explanation: "On Feb. 14, 2019 a server failed, and messages were in queue at the time. When the server was reactivated on Nov. 7, 2019 messages in the queue were released." What makes this statement interesting, is that Syniverse had apparently not been aware that when a server failed it could trap text messages until the server was reactivated. this begs the question, are there anymore old servers that failed and have yet to be reactivated? 

As Luther Vandross can testify for Syniverse, "It's sad to see, so sad to tell. Kinda makes me sad to say but it's a little too late. To forgive you your mistake" ..... and as many customers found when their messages were received "Love don't live here anymore."

No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments are welcomed, or even just thanks if you enjoyed the post. But please make any comment relevant to the post it appears under. Off topic comments will be blocked or removed.

Moderation is on for older posts to stop spamming and comments that are off topic or inappropriate from being posted .... comments are reviewed within 48 hours. I don't block normal comments that are on topic and not inappropriate. Vexatious comments that may cause upset to other commentators, or that are attempting to espouse a particular wider political view, are reviewed before acceptance. But a certain amount of debate around a post topic is accepted, as long as it remains generally on topic and is not an attempt to become sounding board for some other cause.

Final decision on all comments is held by the blog author and is final.

Comments are always monitored for bad or abusive language, and or illegal statements i.e. overtly racist or sexist content. Spam is not tolerated and is removed.

Commentaires ne sont surveillés que pour le mauvais ou abusif langue ou déclarations illégales ie contenu ouvertement raciste ou sexiste. Spam ne est pas toléré et est éliminé.