Michael Jackson was on to something…..

The creepy iMessage moment.

I was on my iPhone messaging two friends about an upcoming event. Suddenly I got a very weird message from one of them that freaked me out. Stream of consciousness and garbled, but with enough tidbits from past conversations for me to see that it WAS from one of these friends. Immediately, I got a private message from my other friend on that thread that said “OMG something’s very wrong!”

AI geek that I am, I quickly pulled up ChatGPT to ask if my iPhone could be listening in to my conversations. It patronized me a bit and said “no, that couldn’t be happening, Rickey.”

A more boring (but real) explanation.

From ChatGPT: you likely ran into an iMessage sync hiccup. Here’s what can cause exactly what you described:

• Cross-device syncing glitch
  If even one person in the thread also uses a Mac, iPad, or Apple Watch, sometimes old cached text snippets can get re-sent in garbled form when the devices resync.
• Corrupt message database
  iMessage stores conversations locally and in iCloud.
  If the database hiccups, it can “stitch together” fragments of old texts (like names or phrases you’ve used) into what looks like a scrambled hallucination.
• Network encoding error
  If the network drops mid-send, the app sometimes reconstructs the message incorrectly, pulling cached words/names.

Creepy? You bet. But it’s really just a bug in how iMessage caches and syncs. Or so they say.

Quick steps to protect and reset.

• Update iOS 
  Go to Settings > General >Software Update and install the latest version. Apple routinely ships fixes for oddball iMessage behaviors..
• Reset iMessage Sync
  Go to Settings > Messages > iMessage off and back on (forces a resync).
• If it happens repeatedly, go to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages and try clearing out older ones (this reduces the cached “pool” that can glitch).

Have you run into this or any other odd messages or quirks on any of your devices? 

Shoot me an email at rickey@whatagreatwebsite.net. We may share your issue in an upcoming blog post.

Read more about staying secure online.

Thanks for reading. Hope you learned something new.