A mobile telephone has issued a notification informing its owner of excessive notifications, completing a loop engineers had considered theoretical.

The alert cannot be dismissed without being acknowledged, which the device records as engagement.

“It told me I had one hundred and forty unread alerts,” said owner Basil Ngata. “That is now one hundred and forty-one.”

The Bureau of Attention Mechanics confirms the design is functioning exactly as specified.

“The system is not trying to reduce your notifications,” said Bureau analyst Dr. Marisol Kyd. “It is trying to inform you about them. Those are different projects, and only one of them is profitable.”

Ngata attempted to disable notifications entirely. The device asked whether he was sure, warned that he might miss something important, and offered a compromise setting called Reduced, which reduces nothing and renames everything.

He selected Reduced.

Bureau research indicates 84 per cent of users select Reduced, and that no user has ever been able to describe what it does.

Ngata has since silenced the device, placed it face down, and checked it four times in eleven minutes to see whether anything had been silenced.

Something had. It was the alarm.