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

• Many 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.
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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.

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