We've concluded that this notification was the result of human error by a Wave employee, and not related to any technical problems.
A Wave employee thought they were sending a message to internal colleagues, on a system that they believed was not part of the actual Invoice app. The employee was incorrect, and what was intended as an internal message, was inadvertently sent to all Android users of the Invoice app.
Though this incident is regrettable, we nonetheless took the opportunity to review our communications, engineering and security practices, and will be working across all teams at Wave to ensure accidents like this do not happen in future.
As this matter is now resolved, we will be re-activating push notifications for the Invoice by Wave app for Android.
On behalf of the Wave team, I apologize again for any concern this incident may have caused you.
We continue to investigate this issue, with an entire team dedicated to its resolution.
Last night, out of an abundance of caution, we turned off push notifications for all Android users, just to make sure no more odd messages are sent or received.
There are a couple of third-party systems used to send push notifications, and we believe the problem lies in that area.
Those systems do not access Wave production databases, and therefore we are confident that customer financial data (accounting information, invoicing information) is in no way impacted or at risk.
Push notifications will remain unavailable until we have certainty of the cause of yesterday's message. To receive information about your invoices and payments, please ensure your Wave email preferences are set to accept Invoice and Payments messages. The data in your Wave account (including Android apps) will also reflect the most up-to-date information, as always.
I apologize that our updates have not been frequent, but please be assured that we continue to have a full team working toward a final wrap-up of this matter.
At approximately 3:20 p.m. (Eastern) today, some users of our Invoice app for Android received a push notification reading "lol".
We've convened a team to investigate the source of this message. Though we haven't identified the cause of this message yet, we are confident that this is a limited communications mystery and not a larger system issue.
Sending a push notification involves a small number of third-party services. Those services are independent of Wave's production databases. In other words, there's a communications layer that can send notifications to a phone, and that layer is not connected to your Wave invoice data, accounting data, etc.
At Wave, we take your information security and privacy very seriously, and we'd rather overreact than underreact. So we have a full team of engineering, product and security experts investigating the situation. However, we expect that this is a communication-technology problem, with no connection or access to Wave production data (accounting, invoicing, payroll or similar data).
We work hard to earn your trust, and we apologize for any concerns this may cause you. We will continue to pursue the answer but no action is required by customers at this time.
We will post updates here as more information becomes available.