A bunch of people mysteriously received text messages in the middle of the night that were originally sent on Valentine's Day, and it caused a lot of confusion

Kaspars Grinvalds/ShutterstockMany smartphone users in the United States received text messages overnight that the sender claims to have never sent, or were sent months ago.The issue was the result of a maintenance update that occurred overnight and caused old messages to be re-sent for some customers, according to Sprint.Many of the texts appeared to have originally been sent on February 14, Valentine's Day.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.On Thursday morning, I woke up to a text message from a close friend asking if I had any plans tomorrow night. That usually wouldn't seem out of the ordinary, but there were two reasons why it struck me as odd: the message was sent around 4 a.m., and my friend had no recollection of sending it because she originally sent it on Valentine's Day.As it turns out, I'm not alone. Twitter was loaded with dozens of tweets from cellphone users who had experienced a similar phenomenon. Some people said that friends or family members received text messages from them in the middle of the night that they had never sent. Others had received old text messages that were from Valentine's Day.The issue was the result of a maintenance update that occurred overnight and impacted the messaging platforms of multiple carriers, a Sprint spokesperson told Business Insider. The update caused some users to have old messages re-sent to their devices, and the problem was resolved shortly after it occurred.T-Mobile also said that the issue was the result of a third-party vendor issue that affected multiple networks, adding that the problem has been resolved. As Sprint ant T-Mobile have said, the issued seemingly impacted cellphone users across various carriers, regardless of whether or not they were using iOS or Android. That certainly resulted in some confusion, especially considering some of those texts were Valentine's Day-themed. It's not the first time users have reported issues involving old messages being re-sent. Questions from customers pointing out similar issues can be found in carrier forums, with some queries dating back to 2011. But those complaints have usually been in reference to isolated incidents; a widespread problem like this seems to be rare. Business Insider has reached out to representatives from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile for additional information and will update this story accordingly.Jill just asked me about some text messages that I apparently sent her at 4:30am. The problem is that my ass was sleep and these messages are no where to be found on my phone! pic.twitter.com/xpLAHPKgBv- Jen Davis (@hypeman_jen) November 7, 2019My friend recieved a text from me at 5am, that I did not send. We both had screen shots, and his clearly shows a text from me saying I sent you an email, and mine doesn't. I have galaxy/verizon, he has iphone/tmobile.- Matthew Hagan 🇺🇸 (@mjhagan75) November 7, 2019@tmobile @abcnews @Verizon @att many people across the US received texts from friends in the middle of the night last night that they didnt really send. What's happening?- K-Lo (@imKLo) November 7, 2019Oh hi! 🙋🏼♀️ Well now I got my reminder who I was dating this past Valentine's Day. What a bizarre thing this is!! https://t.co/8FDwF9UXHo- Leslie Liberty (@hotskillet) November 7, 2019Yep...yep...lol this is a thing that happened. Seriously, her not getting that message ruined our Valentine's. But it's all good now! Floated around in the phone ether until JUST NOW 😂- Prophet 🛩 PAX SOUTH! (@PropheticDr34ms) November 7, 2019 NOW WATCH: Why plane tires don't explode during landing function receiveMessage(event){ console.log(event.data.fullscreen); Android.fullscreen(event.data.fullscreen); }window.addEventListener(message, receiveMessage, false);

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A bunch of people mysteriously received text messages in the middle of the night that were originally sent on Valentine's Day, and it caused a lot of confusion