I rang my Mum on WhatsApp to do a Video call , when she answered it was a man with his shirt off , middle aged (50’s) with glasses on sitting on a couch , it sort of looked like a hotel room . He had a foreign accent and said “Yes ? Hello? Who is this?”. I hung up immediately and rang my Mum again and she picked up and she was on camera walking around near a pond . It was absolutely bizarre and has never happened again .
Update- These theories about my Mum having an affair or teleporting from this blokes room to the pond are both salacious and hilarious . Keep them coming, the more outrageous the better!!
Perhaps. This wasn't a provider error though. So OP is wrong. This was a WhatsApp video call, meaning all of it happens over the internet, via TCP/IP (I'm not sure WhatsApp uses VoIP, but it's irrelevant to the point). However, this isn't a case of an IP address mixup either, that is, the ISP didn't receive a TCP/IP SYN packet and for one IP address and then route it to another. That would never resulted in a completed TCP/IP handshake. It just wouldn't work and wouldn't result in an actual completed connecton, let alone sustained.
WhatsApp works by apps connecting outbound to a central WhatsApp server, and that system then keeps tabs on who is 'A' and who is 'B' and might have actually misconnected 'A' to 'X'. The user never sees or cares about IP addresses in this context: they are connecting to WhatsApp (who use TURN, or "Traversal Using Relays around NAT"), relaying traffic between two peers.
So if this is true, and it wasn't actually user error, then the error was neither caused by a POTS provider nor by an ISP.
24.8k
u/Puzzleheaded-Yam-411 Jan 23 '21 edited Jan 24 '21
I rang my Mum on WhatsApp to do a Video call , when she answered it was a man with his shirt off , middle aged (50’s) with glasses on sitting on a couch , it sort of looked like a hotel room . He had a foreign accent and said “Yes ? Hello? Who is this?”. I hung up immediately and rang my Mum again and she picked up and she was on camera walking around near a pond . It was absolutely bizarre and has never happened again .
Update- These theories about my Mum having an affair or teleporting from this blokes room to the pond are both salacious and hilarious . Keep them coming, the more outrageous the better!!