My random tales:
One night, playing bunch of Halo, I got an Xbox 360 voice message. “Message to all recent players. Fukushima nuclear power plant just exploded. You should stock up on iodine tablets.” (I almost sent back a message saying “thanks for your concern, but I’m in the Chernobyl fallout zone and I turned out just fine thank you”)
Pluto photographs from New Horizons? Frigging NASA retweet. (Edit: Actually I think it was a retweet of someone making a Disney meme about Pluto the Dog)
Most recently, I got a random Discord message from a British YouTuber I follow saying “the Queen just died, please be respectful and stuff”.
I was living with a family in a suburb to Bath in the UK, the son in the family and me was with his friends Bristol for a day, when they suddenly started talking about bombs, yep this was the London bombings in 2005…
At first I didn’t realize what happened, I am Swede and English is my second language, so I had a bit of trouble actually understanding it all.
When we got back home, I called my parents who were in Canada on vacation at the time, they were at a restaurant and had not heard the news yet, so they were very confused but happy that I was fine.
I can just imagine them at a restaurant, getting a call from their son calling to say that he is ok and not to worry with zero context and then hearing about the attacks that way, that must have been quite surreal, but also ment that they was never worried.
So, funny/sad story, I did the exact same thing during the shooting at the college I was attending. (We don’t live in the States, so this is definitely not a common occurrence here!) My family only had one cell phone, and as luck would have it, I had it that day. I called my mom at work to tell her I was ok and in a safe place. My mom was very confused during the call. She later told me that after we hung up and she processed what I had just told her (and heard the news on the radio) she almost went hysterical.