Something very strange is happening to many Apple users - they are receiving seemingly endless group FaceTime calls, often in the middle of the night.

"Yesterday they called me 10 times in 3 minutes. As soon as I hung up, they called again..." I had to turn off FaceTime completely.

"Around midnight, I received a FaceTime call containing 11 numbers," a user wrote in an Apple support thread earlier this month. I put my phone in Airplane mode to ignore the calls ... . When I woke up the next day, I turned off Airplane mode and received a group FaceTime call shortly thereafter."

As Ars Technica's Dan Goodin points out, this has been happening intermittently for nearly a year, with the earliest post to the Apple support thread dating back to March 31, 2020. However, the frequency of posts about this issue has increased in recent weeks.

Organized pranksters appear to be ensuring that participants drop out of group calls and are immediately reconnected. Pranksters appear to be adding random numbers to FaceTime group calls to annoy people.

Unfortunately, if this is happening to you, your options are limited. You can block the group call numbers one at a time, but that doesn't always work because the perpetrator may be using disposable numbers. Alternatively, you can disable FaceTime altogether.

According to Goodin, for now, Apple users cannot limit FaceTime calls to only those numbers in the user's contact list. Nor can they block all numbers in a group call at once.