all major US carriers received text messages overnight that appear to have been sent around Valentine's Day 2019

Mon Nov 11 13:46:59 UTC 2019

On Fri, 8 Nov 2019, Matt Hoppes wrote:

> “During an internal maintenance cycle last night, 168,149 previously
> undelivered text messages were inadvertently sent to multiple mobile
> operators’ subscribers," Syniverse said in a statement.
>
> how do you inadvertently send messages that were supposed to be sent but
> worked and sent? Isn’t that the desired outcome?

  Monitoring and audits usually come after a failure of some sort. Nobody
  thought they needed to make sure all servers are checked for queued unsent
  messages, because the software will *always* do the "right thing."

  I'm sure email didn't have the 5 day deletion after non-delivery when it
  first started out either. Someone got an email a few months late and
  decided some cleanup needed to happen.

  Now you've got custom software running everywhere and similar alerting and
  purging requirements were not made explicitly on how long to hold onto the
  messages.

  I run a phone company and we do hold messages that cannot be delivered for
  a period of time less than a week, but I get paged when that queue holds
  more than X messages or any one message exceeds Y time since attempted
  send. It's not hard, but I've seen lots of pretty obvious issues like this
  overlooked and virtually every company regardless of size, even Amazon.

Beckman
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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at angryox.com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
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