The US telecommunications company Syniverse announced that it was responsible for the delay with which thousands of Valentine's Day SMS messages were delivered in the United States, received in the night between 6 and 7 November, months after the anniversary. The company's admission solved a mystery that had led to hundreds of reports on social networks, with several users amazed and in some cases saddened to have received messages from people they no longer had a relationship with, or in some cases died for months. .
The problem had affected both iPhones and Android smartphones, connected to all major US telephone operators such as AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile and other local telephone companies. Many people had reported on Twitter and Facebook that they were surprised to receive messages after so many months, which they evidently never received in February and without the senders being able to realize it. Some had reported receiving messages from people they had a romantic relationship with, which ended for various reasons, in some cases following the death of their partner.
The telephone operators had given rather elusive answers, but finally Syniverse, which provides some tools for the operation of their networks, admitted to being responsible and provided a brief explanation of what happened. The company explained that at the base of the disservice there was a server, which ended offline due to a technical problem on February 14, before it could sort the SMS received to the various recipients. The server was only brought back online between 6 and 7 November, and at that point the system proceeded to send the SMS that had been trapped in its memory.
Syniverse initially said it had sent 168,149 Valentine's Day messages late, but wanted to investigate further. The company later confirmed that the estimate was preliminary and that the number of text messages sent months away would most likely be higher, but without providing further details. The count includes only the number of messages, but the users concerned – senders and receivers – are about double.
Usually, telephone operators use external suppliers to manage part of the communications between their customers, especially in the case of SMS which must be routed between different networks and systems, depending on the operator of each user. It is for this reason that the problem involved multiple operators and not a single telephone company. Syniverse has amply apologized and committed to introducing additional systems to prevent such problems from occurring in the future.
