Last night, a text message apocalypse was unleashed unto the world. Countless people using all major mobile carriers and different types of phones received a text from someone in their contacts at an odd hour, completely devoid of context. In many cases, the alleged text-senders have had little or no recollection of sending said text, which also isn't showing up in their immediate "sent" history.

The problem, it turns out, can be traced back to a telecommunications company called Syniverse, and dates back to... Valentine's Day 2019.

Earlier today, both Sprint and T-Mobile spokespeople demurred when asked about what had gone wrong, referencing "a maintenance update issue" that "was resolved not long after it occurred," and "a third-party vendor issue." We also contacted Verizon, Apple, and Google, but did not receive responses in time for publication.

As it turns out, the aforementioned "third-party vendor issue" is Syniverse, which "supports text messaging (SMS), multimedia messaging (MMS), Facebook Messenger, WeChat, voice calling, push notification, and chatbots." Syniverse's website has a product page for "intercarrier messaging," where it notes it's connected to more than 300 mobile providers, providing the backbone to 600 billion messages each month.

In an email statement on Thursday evening, Syniverse wrote, "During an internal maintenance cycle last night, 168,149 previously undelivered text messages were inadvertently sent to multiple mobile operators’ subscribers." William Hurley, chief marketing and product officer, apologized "to anyone who was impacted by this occurrence," adding, “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.”

Perhaps no more old messages are being sent, but some damage was done: The now-sent and received text messages, it is not an exaggeration to say, have caused significant anxiety, confusion, and annoyance. (Including, it turns out at the GQ offices. One coworker who received an out-of-the-blue text, when asked for comment after I stuck a recorder in his face, asked to go off the record.)

In screenshots viewed by GQ, many of the previously unsent texts were originally fired off on February 14, when some sort of interruption in the space-time continuum apparently took place, but the intended receivers didn't actually get those messages until this morning. Take the below interaction between two friends, David and Francis, discussing what matters most: sneakers. Francis, it appears, had texted David in February about then-Toronto Raptors superstar Kawhi Leonard's newest signature sneaker for New Balance. David only got the message today.

Two former GQ employees—Camila Pérez (now a project manager at Pentagram) and Caity Weaver (now a writer for the New York Times)—are still unpacking an accidental early-morning interaction. As Camila reports, "I woke up this morning to a text from Caity, and she goes, 'lmao, can I help you?' I had no idea what she was talking about, and I was admittedly out late last night, so I thought I maybe called her or something. She told me I texted her, 'CAITY!!!!' at 4:43 a.m., and I was like, 'No I didn't!' I scrolled up through our convo, and she got engaged on February 14 of this year. I texted her three separate messages about it at the time, and one of them was 'CAITY!!!!' I guess the second two sent, but that one was in limbo until this morning. We've been investigating since."