Comment by jagger27

A while ago I worked on an SMS gateway and somebody had entered their own phone number in some sort of test. Somebody tested it, and there was a bug which triggered 100s of messages to be sent to their phone.

This was over a decade ago, when the messages were stored on the SIM and there was a limit as to how many they could hold (something like 20). So you just fill up the limit and that's it right? Nope, the carrier helpfully buffers messages that can't be received, and they will be sent/received when there is space on the device. I can't remember how they resolved it in the end, I guess just waiting for the messages to expire (72 hours).

I once tried to apply a hotfix in prod by opening the PHP file through ftp and modify it inline and just save. What I was fixing was the email sending logic. Since it was a long time since I had written any PHP, I forgot to add a $ before my i-variable in the loop. It still ran, though, just getting stuck with index=0 and sending email after email. Luckily my user was the first one in the db so no one else was affected.

But since PHP running on a managed host isn't something one can easily "shut off" it ran until it timed out, sending thousands of email to my gmail. While Google could handle it, it ended up locking my account for a few days with an error every time I tried opening the inbox.

Luckily my domain / provider didn't get blocked or spam-listed in the future.