A Peculiar Call Forwarding iOS 5 Bug?

Yesterday I experienced something very odd. I received an email from someone who said they weren’t able to call me. What they only ended up getting was an automated message saying: “there was an authorization error,” and then they got disconnected. Since I have never heard of that problem — or even had anyone complain about it — I picked up my iPhone 4 to further investigate.

I proceeded with checking out the status bar, and low and behold, call forward appeared to be turned on. The odd thing is I am certain I never explicitly turned that on. Everything had been working fine a few hours prior to that email I received. I tried turning off call forwarding, and then rebooted my iPhone. To my surprise, call forwarding was turned on yet again! I logged into my mobile carrier account to make sure nothing funky was going on, although everything seemed perfectly normal there.

After turning off call forwarding two times, the problem went away — or so I thought. Everything worked fine until this evening, where call forwarding decided to turn itself off again. I’m currently running iOS 5.0.1, and have never had this happen before. Since this is a bit of an oddball issue — coupled with the fact that I haven’t come across anyone else complain about this — I’m wondering if there’s something just on my carrier’s side that may be causing the problem.

If anyone else has had first hand experience with this — or knows someone who has — I’d love to hear about it.

Update on Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 1:04 PM by Alex Knight

So I found out that the agent who updated my phone plan somehow managed to turn on call forwarding on one of my lines. It took several reps to figure out what was going on, but I’m glad its resolved and not an iOS bug.