Why More Than 168,000 Valentine's Day Text Messages Arrived in November
upstart writes:
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Why more than 168,000 Valentine's day text messages arrived in November
Did you get a Valentine's Day text message on November 7? If so, you can blame a company called Syniverse, which provides text-messaging services to major mobile carriers.
Syniverse helps deliver text messages via its intercarrier messaging service and boasts that it is "Connected to more than 300 operators" and processes 600 billion messages per month.
Syniverse says it delivers 99.8% of messages within one second. But a server failure caused many messages-exactly 168,149, according to The Washington Post-to be delivered nearly nine months late. (Update: Syniverse later acknowledged that the actual number of late messages was higher, but isn't saying exactly how many there were. See the update later in this article for more.)
"The texts appeared to be sent or received from cellphones with different operating systems and a wide range of carriers, including Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon," the Post noted yesterday.
The incident highlights how mobile carriers aren't the only companies handling your text messages. As the Post story says:
Jon Callas, a senior technology fellow with the American Civil Liberties Union, said text messaging technology is "an incredible mess of software," in which multiple intermediary parties stand between users and carriers. That structure has the potential to create a number of privacy and security issues when a third-party vendor encounters glitches or has its data compromised.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.