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Google Voice briefly displayed wrong phone numbers for texts

Users receiving SMS text messages through Google Voice reported caller ID trouble today.

Casey Newton Former Senior Writer
Casey Newton writes about Google for CNET, which he joined in 2012 after covering technology for the San Francisco Chronicle. He is really quite tall.
Casey Newton
The Google Voice forum this morning.
The Google Voice forum this morning. Screenshot by Casey Newton/CNET

Google Voice users woke up today to something strange in their text messages. Suddenly, texts appeared to becoming from unknown numbers, when in fact they were from friends and family.

Google Voice support forums lit up with complaints, as first reported by the Verge. Within about three hours of the first reports, Google had identified and fixed the problem.

"Google Voice experienced an issue displaying the incorrect caller ID for outbound SMS," a spokeswoman told CNET. "The issue should now be resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience caused."

Incidentally, the incorrect caller ID numbers didn't belong to real people, I'm told. They were unassigned numbers used for testing purposes.