Why more than 168,000 Valentine’s day text messages arrived in November

Article note: In addition to the near fight with the girlfriend due to a 9 month old message appearing annoyance, that's some exceptional ineptitude from what is theoretically serious infrastructure.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

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.)