Bugs & Fixes: Texting fails for just one person
When writing up bug reports for this column, I prefer to have guaranteed solutions to offer. However, a few problems are so frustrating and mysterious that I’ll cover them even without a known reliable fix. That’s the situation today.
A few weeks ago, I sent several SMS text messages to a friend via the Messages app on my iPhone 5. They went unanswered. I eventually learned that he had never received the messages. Not only that, he had sent me a couple of messages during the same time period that I never received. When we finally sat down together to figure out what was going on, we confirmed the obvious: we could neither send nor receive text messages between our two smartphones.
Here’s where things gets weirder. My friend is the only person I cannot text. Ditto in reverse for my friend. Not only that, we have been exchanging texts for years without any difficulty. It’s only in the past few weeks that we’ve had this difficulty. He is using the same smartphone (not an iPhone) and same carrier he’s had for the past two years. The only apparent change that might be linked to when the symptom first popped up was on my end: I upgraded to an iPhone 5 and iOS 6 around the time the texts started to fail (although I can’t confirm that the failures began immediately after the upgrade).
I tried a couple of obvious potential fixes. First, I restarted my iPhone. Second, I deleted the entire conversation with my friend and began a new one. Neither had any effect.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.macworld.com/article/2016083/bugs-and-fixes-texting-fails-for-just-one-person.html
