Webhooks Setup

Subscribe to Webhooks to get notifications about messages your business receives and customer profile updates.

Create an Endpoint

Before you can start receiving notifications you will need to create an endpoint on your server to receive notifications.

Your endpoint must be able to process two types of HTTPS requests: Verification Requests and Event Notifications. Since both requests use HTTPs, your server must have a valid TLS or SSL certificate correctly configured and installed. Self-signed certificates are not supported.

Webhooks set up will not affect the phone number on your WhatsApp Business App. Only after you migrate your number over to the WhatsApp Business Platform can you no longer use that number on your WhatsApp Business App.

Subscribe to Webhooks

To subscribe to Webhooks, you will need to get a Meta App ID and permissions. To do this go to the Meta App Dashboard. There you will:

At any time, each Meta App can have only one endpoint configured. If you need to send your webhook updates to multiple endpoints, you need multiple Meta Apps.

If you are a Solution Partner, you may need to:

Understanding Webhooks

Whenever a trigger event occurs, the WhatsApp Business Platform sees the event and sends a notification to a Webhook URL you have previously specified. You can get two types of notifications:

  • Received messages: This alert lets you know when you have received a message. These can also be called "inbound notifications" throughout the documentation.

  • Message status and pricing notifications: This alert lets you know when the status of a message has changed —for example, the message has been read or delivered. These can also be called "outbound notifications" throughout the documentation.

All Webhooks have the following generic format:

{
  "object": "whatsapp_business_account",
  "entry": [{
      "id": "WHATSAPP_BUSINESS_ACCOUNT_ID",
      "changes": [{
          "value": {
              "messaging_product": "whatsapp",
              "metadata": {
                  "display_phone_number": "PHONE_NUMBER",
                  "phone_number_id": "PHONE_NUMBER_ID"
              },
              # specific Webhooks payload            
          },
          "field": "messages"
        }]
    }]
}

See Components for information on each field.

If you receive a message that is not supported for Cloud API, you will get an unknown message webhook.

Payload Size

Webhooks payloads can be up to 3MB.

Sample App Endpoints

Create a sample app endpoint to test your webhooks.

Webhook Delivery Failure

If we send a webhook request to your endpoint and your server responds with an HTTP status code other than 200, or if we are unable to deliver the webhook for another reason, we will keep trying with decreasing frequency until the request succeeds, for up to 7 days.

Note that retries will be sent to all apps that have subscribed to webhooks (and their appropriate fields) for the WhatsApp Business Account. This can result in duplicate webhook notifications.

IP Addresses

You can get the IP addresses of our webhook servers by running the following command in your terminal:

whois -h whois.radb.net — '-i origin AS32934' | grep ^route | awk '{print $2}' | sort

We periodically change these IP addresses so if you are allow-listing our servers you may want to occasionally regenerate this list and update your allow-list accordingly.

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