Did You Receive Weird Text Messages Yesterday? If So You Aren’t Alone.

Numerous individuals received bizarre text messages yesterday from one or more of their contacts. The text messages were sent out accidentally by a third-party vendor called Syniverse that handles text messaging services for multiple phone carriers.

During routine maintenance, hundreds of thousands of undelivered texts were sent out to users. Quartz reports that Syniverse told it that 168,149 previously undelivered text messages were accidentally sent to multiple mobile operators’ subscribers.

“We apologize to anyone who was impacted by this occurrence,” William Hurley, chief marketing and product officer at Syniverse, said in a statement provided to Quartz. “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.”

Many of the texts were sent in the middle of the night and went out to users in the States and Canada. Verizon has stated that the issue affected both iOS and Android users and happened across all carriers. Sprint has said that maintenance caused messages to be resent to some users.