messages arriving on Chinese characters

Apparently some kind of software bug or whatnot causing this. Probably will be an update.

I'm having this issue on two different unlocked, non-ATT devices, and there's been no software updates in the last many months on either.

Emoticons were working for me last week. Now I get corrupted SMS messages that are half-english half-non-ascii.

Really hoping this gets addressed ASAP. I've seen so many people posting about this issue all around the net and they all are within the last few days. 

Edit:

Well, to be fair, it could truly be a software issue, just not on my end. I'm only having this issue when someone with an iPhone sends me an SMS with emoticons. 

The same thing is happening to my recipients with texts sent from my Samsung Android phone.  However, it is intermittent, and I just checked and the problem does appear to be linked to the use of emoticons.  So obviously the short-term solution is to not use them.  But ATT needs to fix this.

I saw chatter on another (not ATT board) from 2014 which identified a similar problem, and in that case it was linked to an attack on the phone.  If so, and if there is any indication that this is the case now, ATT should put out an alert until the problem is resolved!

Still possible that this is an attack on our phones, so definitely avoid until ATT resolves the issue.

I appeciatel everyone's info.  I'm receiving short messages just fine, with or without emoticons.  It's hard to tell all my friends and family not to use them when texting me and only me, that's not going to work.  It's the longer messages that are converted to Chinese characters, and both the folks I have received these corrupted message do have iPhones.  I hope that a fix is found soon; it is really annoying.

This wouldn't likely be an update on phones/devices, but on the server side.

I guess it could depend on where the tranformation is going bad, but it would seem to be some sort of server parser or XML transform or similar is more likely the culprit.

Yeah, @OneToughCookie, you could definitely "inject" some bad code, particularly depending on how the transofrmations are being done, but my  guess is that the most likely "target" would be the AT&T servers, although I suppose it could be devices too.

It's hard to say, but I'd be willing to bet there are numerous people looking at this, given the possibilities ;-]

Tell her to stop using emoticons, for now, there's a problem with the AT&T parser, or similar.

What pgrey said. Ask the sender to resend without any emotes and that'll solve the issue. Trending issue and a fix should be in the works.