Customers say they wrote and nothing is in Conversations. There are only a few causes, and Settings → Inboxes → the inbox → Account Health distinguishes them.
The one to check first
Webhook not configured, or a URL that does not match. WhatsApp delivers incoming messages by calling your installation; if Meta does not know where to call, or is calling somewhere else, nothing arrives and nothing fails visibly. Press Register Webhook on that tab.
This is the commonest cause by a wide margin, and it is the one that produces exactly the symptom of total silence rather than partial trouble.
The rest, in order
| What you see | What it is |
|---|---|
| WhatsApp connection needs to be refreshed, or access token needs attention | the credential stopped being accepted. See error 190 and reconnect a number |
| Status Banned, Disconnected or Deleted | the number's standing at Meta. See what the status means |
| An incoming message that is there but empty | it arrived and WhatsApp would not hand it over. See error 131060 |
| Health data is not available | Meta did not answer this request. Try again before concluding anything |
| Everything looks healthy | the messages may be arriving in an inbox this agent is not a collaborator on — see set up an inbox |
That last row is worth taking seriously before escalating. An agent sees only the inboxes they are a member of, so "nothing is arriving" and "nothing is arriving for me" look identical from an agent's screen.
What an operator can check that you cannot
A deployed installation has a read-only diagnostic an operator runs on the server. It reports whether Meta's calls are reaching the route, whether the background workers are processing them, what the queue depth is, and what the recent outbound failures actually said. If Account Health looks healthy and messages still are not appearing, that is the next step and it is the operator's, not yours.
A worked example
Messages stop on a Sunday. Account Health says Webhook not configured. The administrator presses Register Webhook, the warning clears, and a test message from their own phone appears in Conversations within seconds. The messages customers sent while the webhook was missing never arrive — WhatsApp had nowhere to deliver them — so the team answers what did arrive and reopens the rest with a template.
Who can do this
Administrators, for everything above. An agent can confirm the symptom and should escalate rather than wait.
Limits
- Messages sent while the webhook was missing are gone. There is no backfill and no replay. This is the single most important limit on this page.
- There is no alert when incoming messages stop. Silence looks like a quiet day.
- Registering the webhook does not fetch anything retrospectively.
- Account Health reports Meta's answer at that moment, not a history.