Text Outage

Posted January 6, 2019

So I finally realized I had an actual problem with my text messaging today.

I was trying to login to something that uses SMS for 2FA and wasn't receiving it. I'd had this happen a few days ago, too, but dismissed it quickly and used an alternative method. This time, there wasn't an alternative, only SMS - and that wasn't working.

After trying to get it to send to me a few times, I tried sending myself a text from my work phone. That failed, so I knew something was up.

Why didn't I notice this earlier? Very coincidental timing. A week or so before this outage, I switched to using Signal. Several of my frequent contacts started using this as well. When both parties are using Signal, the "texts" don't go through the carrier as usual, they're encrypted end-to-end and don't count as an SMS message for billing purposes. Anyway, so I was still getting texts to and from these people, so I didn't think there was a problem.

I did get one complaint about being blocked, but I discounted that as unrelated as well. But based on that report, it appears this has been an issue since January 2nd. :(

Once I knew there was a problem, a quick chat with Ting got the issue resolved.

If you've sent me a text message this year and I didn't respond, please try again!