Update 05/04/2024 at 8:05am ET: The SMS issue appears to be fixed now, according to Brad Seftel, who first reported the problem to MobileSyrup. The original story continues below.
SMS issues are plaguing a small number of Canadians, notably Freedom and Rogers customers.
MobileSyrup started tracking the SMS issue on May 3rd after receiving a tip from Brad Seftel on the website better known as Twitter. According to Seftel and a Reddit post about the issue, it began around 7pm on Wednesday night.
Both Seftel and the Reddit post detailed an issue with messages sent by customers on the Rogers network not being received by customers on Freedom Mobile. However, messages from Freedom apparently go through to Rogers customers.
@MobileSyrup @Jon_Lamont there's a sms outage between Rogers/Fido and freedom mobile for the past day now. Details appear to be rogers customers can receive SMS from freedom but freedom customers don't receive the replies. since ~7pm Wed. Uniquely iPhone to Android issue mostly
— Brad Seftel (@TBJ_DRW) May 3, 2024
The issue doesn’t appear to be widespread in part because it impacts just SMS messages. That means most messages between Android devices, which use the RCS standard, aren’t impacted. Likewise, most messages between iPhones use iMessage. Oddly, Seftel said MMS messages still worked for him.
MobileSyrup attempted to recreate the issue but had no problems sending SMS messages between devices on Rogers and Freedom networks.
Freedom Mobile told MobileSyrup that there was an issue but said its SMS systems were “working correctly.” It also said that the “majority of SMS traffic from Rogers to Freedom” was unaffected.
Update 05/04/2024 at 7:18am: Rogers confirmed to MobileSyrup that a small number of customers were unable to send SMS messages to some Freedom customers and that it was working with Freedom on a solution. The company noted that it deployed a “temporary technical solution” to address the issue and will deploy a technical fix to address the problem going forward. Rogers claims fewer than 10 people reported experiencing the SMS issue. However, it’s possible the impact was wider but went unnoticed due to messages going over RCS and/or iMessage in most cases.
Seftel told MobileSyrup that when he contacted Freedom about the issue, the carrier told him that they were aware of an issue with the SMSC provider and were working on a fix.
The short message service centre (SMSC) is a part of mobile networks used to store, forward, convert and deliver SMS messages. Typically when sending SMS messages, they go from a phone to the SMSC, which will then pass the message to the recipient. If the recipient is on another network, the SMSC sends the message to that network’s SMSC, which then sends the message to the recipient if their device is available to receive it.
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