Problem

Contacts are receiving SMS messages out of order in Everbridge Suite.

Root Cause

• SMS messages longer than 160 characters sent to mobile phone carriers other than U.S. Cellular will be split into multiple messages and delivered as multiple, sequenced messages to SMS subscribers.
• Verizon may drop a character in messages longer than 160 characters. More information can be found in the following knowledge article EBS: SMS Text Message Notifications With Missing Characters Are Being Sent to Contacts in Everbridge Suite.
• U.S. Cellular will truncate messages longer than 150 characters; in other words, your contacts who are subscribers of U.S. Cellular will not see any characters past the 150th character in the message.
• Mobile phone carriers do not guarantee the delivery of messages in the order in which the larger message as split into smaller messages.
• AT&T is the only mobile phone carrier who is known to combine the split message parts into the original longer message upon delivery to the subscriber’s mobile device.
• Mobile phone carriers in international destinations may truncate long messages at the 160th character – in other words, your message recipients may not see any characters past the 160th character.

Solution

Avoid creating messages that contain more than 120 characters.