This post is a few minutes from the start of this event, in between 2023-08-17 05:00 and 2023-08-18 22:00 UTC, see https://cloudflarestatus.com . If you use Cloudflare and watch the scheduled maintenance activity start or kicked in, you'd notice that resources got a blip, just for a second. They went out and a refreshed would make those affected resources return and its noticeable for websites. In our end, everything seemed to be working fine, with a little, lag, if your eyes are set on to your traffic right now. Here, we can see it's okay overall. Right?
If you are sending SMS texts to your friends, family or colleagues and they contain internet or web address including IP and email addresses, and even a period or dot separating, regardless of, your words and numbers, they are automatically blocked and not going to be received by your waiting recipient. Cooler heads must prevail here especially if an important message is urgently being expected.
IP version 6 address is fine. However, an IPv4 including localhost address (given automatically to every computers and network interfaces as their own alone designed for troubleshooting purposes), and your money in the billion figure using dot as separators would be blocked.
If you send "local.business, naman.naman etcetera" or any words that made you use dot in between them, as part of the text, they will be blocked. There are some, that isn't blocked in this category. Like check.iclassed, some.ent, whatever.local etcetera, that is because they do not form any domain name at all. Unlike artificial.intelligence, the first two (in) or three (int) after the dot which are India's and international organization's top level domains, respectively, most probably are being parsed as that by their blocking system.
More so on legitimate top level domains in which there are now hundreds of these identified as generic and country code top level domains and domain hacks as well.
Any web address, even if its legitimate, including government and business domain names, if you send them as part of your SMS text, they will be blocked. Your entire text are not delivered at all and there's nothing that will be received on the other end.
The same thing for numbers with dot in between including IP (192.168.1.1) and email ([email protected]) addresses.
But we are still receiving scam texts. Right? That's because in those texts, they don't use dot anymore. They are now using semicolon or comma or dot-using the whole word.
If you send "local,business" or any other message you have to with that format, it will get through, and so with the use of said other very simple schemes.
With the parameters being blocked as mentioned above, we tried to send some SMS texts with setting as the following
- From/to Smart, both numbers are from Smart, the SMS texts were going through. All SMS sent through Smart and within its own network passes through, except for some texts that is lost, which is not received, for whatever reason, but probably not necessarily due to blocking of scam SMS texts. This issue seems to occur to all networks.
- From/to Globe, both numbers are from Globe, the SMS texts were not going through. Even sending .com and other top level domains i.e. .net, .org alone as the only content of SMS texts, they do not go through. When a Globe subscriber send an SMS which contains link or domain name to another Globe number, same thing happened, it would not pass through. Globe, however, can send these links and domain names to its subscribers as we can see when we are getting SMS from them via their multiple channels or the 4-digit numbers that they mostly use for some of their services.
- From Smart to Globe and from Globe to Smart, SMS texts were not going through. It could be one network is totally doing the blocking.
Networks not identified here were not part of the test or incidental activity, we should say. If you've got some extra load you can try these with other mobile number of yours or colleagues'.
Comments
Those who made such decisions are not sensitive to people's business, in PH this is sadly just the truth. They are only after their own profit, grow and ignore concerns of subscribers.
Looks like human errors are increasingly getting in the way of technology's job. iclassed has taught me well, try it's sorbefacient tutorial, and I completely understood why problems are becoming a norm in every technology effort. There is a solution to this, only that there are so many wrong people in those kind of position.
Suzuki-san