I feel your pain. Was on verizon a while back and had issues with texts not being delivered for days or sometimes weeks and often out of order. It totally didn't help the communication issues that were plaguing my relationship at the time.

is your friend on verizon by any chance? (they’re having a full system outage)

Oh that explains things; tried to run an errand and noticed my phone was basically useless 😭 I thought it was me