Text messages sent to Google Fi users with Hangouts went missing last week

A Google Fi person in Hawaii acquired a pair textual content messages Monday evening wishing him a cheerful Easter. The issue is, these messages had been despatched on Easter Sunday, however solely made it by greater than a day later.

Google is now informing Fi customers who obtain textual content messages by Hangouts that messages despatched to them might have gone lacking between March 31st and April fifth. The corporate mentioned there was a service “interruption” that impacted “a small variety of folks.” Google says it has now resolved the difficulty and is sending by the delayed messages. Lacking messages ought to seem in Hangouts by the top of at present, April seventh.

Fi customers have for years been capable of ship and obtain calls and messages by Hangouts, however Google introduced plans years in the past to strip these options out because it transitioned Hangouts into one more Google communications app. The options seem to have been disabled throughout the final week.

However the interruption occurred earlier than the service was absolutely shut down, and so Google remains to be working to patch the delayed messages by to Hangouts. A Google spokesperson confirmed the service interruption to The Verge and mentioned affected customers are being contacted. SMS messages shall be delivered to Messages by Google or one other default messaging app going forward.

Delayed messages may cause actual issues for senders and receivers. In November 2019, greater than 168,000 messages had been delivered that had initially been despatched on Valentine’s Day 2019, 9 months earlier. Folks acquired complicated, context-free messages — in some circumstances, messages got here by from individuals who had died within the months between. The difficulty was attributable to a server failure at Syniverse, a agency that routes textual content messages between carriers.

Google has been within the technique of shutting down Hangouts for years, so it’s doable there weren’t many customers left utilizing the service at the side of Fi. Even the Fi person in Hawaii — who, full disclosure, is a buddy of mine — mentioned they knew they need to have switched some time in the past and determined to not.

“I deliberately put myself on this spot,” Jason Bennett, who acquired the delayed Easter messages, advised The Verge. “I wished to see what occurred when it went offline.”