SMS Disabled?

Text notifications continue to be completely flaky. In the last 24 hours:

No texts at all starting around eight last night until around 10 this morning.

Then, text notifications, but with a 2 to 3 minute lag. Support said give it some time.

After couple of hours got the regular near instantaneous text notifications. That lasted about four hours.

Then had about an hour and a half when I got double or triple text notifications for everything.

Then another couple of hours with no text notifications.

And then got text notifications with a measured six minute lag.

I’ve given all this information to support.

In what may or may not be a related problem, a number of scheduled events, including the sunset offset, failed to fire.

None of this is custom code,it’s all just hello home actions and shortcut groups.

I just share this, so other people know they’re not crazy. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

And in case anyone is using text notification for any critical use cases, such as monitoring medicine cabinets or welfare checks.

No incidents listed on Status page. Is this an isolated or limited problem? I have a few critical alerts set to be sent by SMS, so I subscribe to the Status alerts for extra caution. Thanks for the heads up.

No idea, but support was very aware of it when I contacted them.

I don’t understand the criteria for what gets posted to the status page. I don’t think sunny field, for example, ever got posted there, although it was in the release notes when the fix was released.

And the double toggle problem with the Aeon Minimote was never posted to the status page.

And the dynamic current dynamic page issue in the mobile that has never been posted, although it’s been a couple of weeks now.

Unless they just toss everything into the “some scheduled events fail to fire” category and leave it at that?

BTW, text notification seems to be working again this morning, but I have no idea if it will stay that way. We are using that as a doorbell for the front gate, which is why i am so aware of the failures, normally it triggers every couple of hours.

Yesterday people were inside the house before the gate bell rang, or it wasn’t ringing at all, or it was ringing three times. Or it was working fine. The pattern just kept changing all day. :pensive:

The only problems were with smartthings, though. I have other texts set up with IFTTT, harmony, my security system, and my medical alert system, and all of those were fine. And like I said, support at smartthings was very aware of the problem when I wrote to them.

But as to how many people were affected, I have no idea.

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@April: Could you please research and help explain what types of system issues we can expect to see and which we won’t see on the Status Page when you get the chance? No particular rush. It’s just that the Status page is a great idea that is “not so great” if we don’t understand what it covers. Sometimes it seems like we get too many alerts from the page due to short duration or isolated problems. Other times it seems there is a major problem, but no status alert 
 :confused:

Thanks!!! :smiley:

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Next Developer Call will be on 04/08/2015 - Guest : Jeff Hagins around the 25 mark. we mentioned what we’d mention on status.smartthings.com and what wouldn’t be.

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Thanks, April


But may I ask for the bite-sized answer regarding SMS outages specifically?

that SHOULD have been on status.smartthings.com. but there were no support tickets that came in about it. Therefore support and engineering did not know it was an incident, until one of us (Shout out to my favorite @jim of all times!) stumbled upon this thread, and escalated it. thus I’m going to quote my favorite interstellar puppy, who quoted me:

But as @April says, Tech Support’s correlation of issue reports is probably the quickest way for ST to identify / confirm bugs.

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That doesn’t seem right. I wrote to support about it and received multiple replies.

I just checked: I reported it on April 15 at 8:40 a.m. And received a reply from Chris Porter

Thanks for contacting us. I looked into this, and a few other users also experienced a brief laps in texts not going out for them also.

I reported again on the 16th that there were still weird problems. So support certainly had user reports, but nothing on the status page.

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Things that make you go “hmmmm
”. :confused:

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Found part of the problem with the double notifications. It’s not the only reason for the double notifications, but it did get rid of many of them.

When I updated the phone to iOS 8.3, it reset the default on my notifications so that a notification would repeat once two minutes later if I hadn’t done something with the phone.

since I was using a specific chime for the gate bell notification, I wasn’t doing anything with the phone. Consequently every gate bell was ringing twice, unless I happened to do something with the phone in between.

Resetting the IOS notification repeat to “never” took care of those repeats.