Is It Rude To Text People Late At Night? Etiquette Experts Have Thoughts.

I’m someone who almost always has her phone on silent during the day and has it automatically set to “Do Not Disturb” at night. And while I’m not often awake late enough these days to send any middle-of-the-night messages, I do live in a different time zone than my family and a couple of my closest friends. So a text sent at a very reasonable 8:30 p.m. for me is actually 11:30 p.m. for them.

Still, I never gave the timing of my textstoo much thought — until I came across this viral tweet from content creator Michaela Okland.

“Wait is it rude to send texts in the middle of the night I just assume [people] have their phones on do notdisturb when they’re asleep and will see when they wake up but what if I’ve been waking people up this whole time,” the co-host of the “Late Night Drive” podcast wrote in June.

The post has since been viewed more than 1 million times and amassed over 1,000 replies, according to X, formerly Twitter.

Okland surmised that the general consensus, based on those who weighed in on her post, is that it’snot rude to text people at odd hours “because if they really get woken up by notifications, they’d likely have them all off at night,” she told HuffPost.

She noted, however, that there were some generational differences when it comes to this topic.

“People a bit older — and even more so if they have children they might not want to miss a late-night concerned message from — you need to be a bit more careful with,” she told HuffPost. “Potentially schedule the text to be sent to them in the morning.”

(You can do this quite easily on an Android, but it’s more complicated on an iPhone and requires a third-party app, for the time being. That should change whenthe iOS 18 update is released in the coming