I followed this forum and tried everything but nothing has worked until I came up with my own solution! I am sharing it in case it works for others. I was able to fix this issue after two days of "waiting for activation". Here is my guess of what is causing the problem: - Your phone tries tell iMessage server that it should activate your number. - Based on where you live (region/country) your request gets picked up by different servers (UK vs US vs France for example). - The server that picks up the request sends a text message to your phone to confirm that the number really belongs to you. Depending on which server has been assigned to you, you may be getting the text message from a different country code. - Your iPhone monitors the text messages that come in. When the iMessage activation text message comes in your iPhone doesn't show you that message. What we are trying to do with the fix below is to tell iMessage to use a different server to send your activation message. Go to Settings > Messages Tap on your apple id. When prompted enter your apple id and password. Change your location/region (I changed it from US to UK). Go back and now everything should be working fine! Don't forget to change your region back to US afterwards.