Anyone else experience SMS text messaging delays at midnight?
By Will Park on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 4:27 PM PST In Random, Services
And by midnight, we mean the approximate time of your particular time-zone’s “New Year” crossover. It seems that, with SMS text messaging volume hitting new highs, the volume of mobile-based messages from texters sending out “New Year” tidings and cheer caused something of a system-overload.
We found that text messages failed to send, or took much much longer than usual, around the stroke of midnight - “New Year’s,” if you prefer. Specifically, AT&T (NYSE: T)’s Manhattan network seemed to have clogged up with masses of text messages that probably went something like “Happy New Year’s!”
Anyone else experience similar delays? As more and more people rely on text messages to stay in touch, carriers might want to increase capacity or move SMS data through data networks rather than the traditional voice network.
lol… this happens every new year at midnight in sweden.. maybe time to send more sms americans?;)
Its usually like that on New Year eve in London, it takes a few attempts to send a text, pretty much par for the course. Pretty understandable really, the volume of texts at midnight must be enormous. I experiemced the same thing during the blackout in Manhattan in 2004 and during the London bombs. It probably wont make financial sense for mobile networks to make big changes as it holds up pretty well usually and I am sure they clear up a lot of capacity for that 1 night anyway.
Yes, Orange UK was down as is usual between 11pm and about 4am.
Forgot to turn my phone to silent, so annoyingly got woken up at some point aroun 5am when the sms came flooding in.
I live in Cairo , Egypt and the whole network of Vodafone Egypt went down , not SMS delays but people couldn’t reach me and i was unable to do phone calls
Ha, it’s funny to see this reported like it’s a new problem. It’s all part of the new year experience for the more advanced SMS countries. I remember the same thing happening in 1999. This year was better than previous years though because I got all of my texts by 1am instead of the usual 4am.
should add, im on an Irish network but roaming in the UK at the moment.
Some of mine didn’t get through as well…rather annoying, but it’s obviously to be expected. I’m still in favor of calling rather than texting though…you never know if a text gets through or not!
In the middle of nowhere in germany: 20 minutes delay
My wifes SMS didn’t go thorough so our breakfast plans fell thorough.
They just referenced this post on CNN this morning…
wtf on CNN!? This isnt exactly a new thing - is it new in the US?
Yeah- everything is news to CNN.
They just reported on the LiIon battery deal yesterday- showed stock footage of AA’s, D cells, NiMh rechargables… pretty much everything but lithium ion batteries.
It just caught my ear when they mentioned “a user on intomobile.com reported blah, blah blah…”
I was hijacked on paypal account at skype, don’t even talk about phone troubles…