Your message to... who now?
May 13, 2019 11:56 PM   Subscribe

My iPhone briefly displayed a notification this morning which read "Your message to Joe failed to send". The weird part: I hadn't sent any messages and I don't have anyone called Joe in my contacts. I would think I'd imagined it if I hadn't been looking at the phone when it happened.

I have iMessages and WhatsApp installed on the phone. I checked that there are no failed outgoing messages sitting in either iMessage or WhatsApp. I can't find the notification which popped up when I go into the notifications centre either, and I would be starting to doubt myself except that I was looking at the screen at the time. What's going on?
posted by meronym to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Were you using your phone (in a browser?) at the time? Is it possible it was a banner ad designed to look like a notification?
posted by brainmouse at 12:06 AM on May 14, 2019


This doesn't seem to match your description but: WhatsApp discovers 'targeted' surveillance attack
posted by XMLicious at 2:29 AM on May 14, 2019 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Mystery solved!

Apparently sometimes after an iOS update, iPhones can display very old message failure notifications. My iPhone did install a software update overnight, and it turns out that the mysterious 'Joe' is actually the guy who tiled our bathroom in 2017, and who I did send a couple of texts to around that time.
posted by meronym at 3:40 AM on May 14, 2019 [26 favorites]


I did not see this until just now, but I had this same sort of situation maybe a year ago when for about three days running I got a notification that "Your message to John failed to send" and then even more cryptically added that it was 914 days ago (the count increasing each day). It stopped of its own accord, but I am pleased to learn belatedly what was going on.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:16 PM on May 15, 2019


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