SMS outbound no longer works for Company Main Number

What is your account id or exact company name?

How do you send text messages from the main company number, via your app or via the RingCentral app?

The SMS text messaging industry has changed a lot since the pandemic and mobile carriers are much stricter in blocking P2P (Person-to-Person) messaging violation. Once a number is blocked by a mobile carrier because of violations, there is not much RingCentral can help to get it unblocked unless the use case is legitimate and misinterpreted.

See the SMS policy https://developers.ringcentral.com/guide/messaging/sms-content-policy

My Company Main Number is still experiencing the same issue with outbound SMS. The last status update I received from Tier 2 is that there is a bug on my account and the RC system is blocking it without a violation. Apparently the Engineering department has been working on it since December 27. Is there a faster resolution to this issue, can this be escalated to another department so it can be worked on immediately? Case number is 14262533.

Ana and RC Support,

This is not an answer but this has been an ongoing issue for our company as well. We go into an outbound (and sometimes inbound) SMS outage 1 or 2 days per month. Our main number is what is used by our customers and they are getting very frustrated because they cannot communicate with us in the way they have for the last 6 years. This has been happening since September and I am experiencing the issue again today. Some ticket numbers I have had created since this issue started: 13569424, 13591901, 13745448, 14137017. Phong - I have reviewed SMS Content policy and we are following the guidelines provided.

Our company has been a RC customer since 2016 and I would also like a way to escalate this issue beyond Tier 2/Tier 3 support.

Hi everyone,

I fully understand your frustration of being unable to send SMS messages from your RingCentral phone numbers and the customer support could not help much. Remember that this is the developer community though. It is mainly dedicated for developers to ask questions and share experiences related to programming and application development using RingCentral API platform.

Since you are using the RingCentral app to send text messages, the issue you are facing is not a programming problem. I believe that the cause of the problem in many cases is that the numbers got blocked by mobile carriers, either by mistake or on purpose. The rules applied to SMS text messaging are not created nor controlled by RingCentral. They are guidances set by government agencies and reenforced by mobile carriers, the last node in the text message delivery chain, who decides whether or not to deliver the message to their subscribers.

It's hard for us to say why a number got blocked or a message got flagged without knowing the actual message, the number of messages and the frequency you sent, and also the send/receive 1:1 ratio, and ultimately, a list of recipient's carriers. These are the information a customer support would need to provide to a mobile carrier to investigate the root cause and resolve the problem.

You mentioned that it used to work before and now it stops working. Well, text messaging compliance has changed over the time and it changed a lot during the pandemic, particularly to business (non-consumer) text messaging. Also, carriers' messaging violation detections are automated and accumulated when it reaches a certain threshold.

Last but not least, unfortunately those case numbers are customer support cases (not dev support case) so I don't have access to the cases.

In order for me to jump in to help you with, please provide your account id and the last 4 digits of the phone number which got blocked (remember that this is a public forum, No sensitive information should be posted here). You will also grant a permission for us to access your message store to get the information needed by mobile carriers when we escalate the case to them. Alternatively, you can access your cases and ask the customer support to contact me (Phong Vu) to assist. In that case, you don't need to provide further information to this thread.

Hope this helps!

P.S. If you would like to ask non-programming questions in the forum, use the Customer Community instead.

Again, I cannot say w/o knowing if the recipient number is always the same number. Or recipient numbers are different and different carriers too.

Regarding the delay, we cannot be sure where it got stuck without the detailed data. This is the short path a text message would go thru, RC - Upstream (SMS Gateway) - Mobile carrier - Subscriber. Any node can cause the delay.

Pls clarify that if all 10 text messages failed or some failed, some passed?