Product changelog and announcements

Link Shortening is now accessible in public beta on the Programmable Messaging API. This functionality enables you to programmatically shorten long links with your own company branded domain without any extra API calls. You can also set up your webhook to receive click events when recipients of the messages click on the shortened link.

Read our API documentation to get started.

Message Scheduling can now be used to develop compliant healthcare applications that contain protected health information (PHI) for organizations that are subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Twilio will sign Business Associate Addendums (BAA) with covered entities and business associates for HIPAA Eligible Products and Services.

Learn more about how to build on Twilio for HIPAA compliance.

Twilio has implemented an urgent precautionary measure to protect Programmable Messaging accounts created before April 2019 from possible exploitations of their service by automatically disabling unused SMS Geo Permissions. We’re taking this action to protect customers from potential fraud known as SMS Traffic Pumping. Given the rise of fraud in the ecosystem, we want to help ensure that we minimize potential exploits and reduce the risks faced by our customers. Disabling destination countries your business doesn’t serve or uses infrequently is an additional line of defense against fraudulent activity. See this Help Center article for more information on SMS Traffic Pumping Fraud and how to protect your applications from it.

Why only accounts created before April 2019?

Accounts created during and before March 2019 previously had SMS Geo Permissions enabled globally by default. For our customers’ convenience and protection, Twilio will disable SMS Geo Permissions on a one-time basis for country destinations to which messages have not been sent in the 30 day period from 23 July 2022 to 22 August 2022. This one-time action on accounts will begin on 25 August 2022 and end on or before 9 September 2022.

If needed, you can enable or disable SMS Geo Permissions to any country at any time in Twilio Console by following the steps in this Support Article.

Twilio Message Scheduling is now generally available for use!

Message scheduling enables developers to schedule and send an SMS, MMS or WhatsApp for a time in the future, all within a single API call. Iterations since our beta release include adding support for HIPAA Eligibility, enabling a scheduled message to send 15 min in advance (previously 60 min), and increasing the account usage limitations to enable higher volume sending.

For more information, see the Message Scheduling Documentation.

Twilio customers sending messages via US A2P 10DLC can now log into Twilio Console - Trust Hub - A2P Messaging to check whether they have been incurring penalty fees from sending unregistered message segments.

You can now utilize the ampersand (&) character in Twilio Alphanumeric Sender IDs. This can help you send text messages from a sender that better represents your brand name: for example, Owl&Co. This feature is only available in Alphanumeric Sender ID-eligible countries. Please refer to this guide to learn how to use Alphanumeric Sender IDs with Twilio messaging services.

Sending WhatsApp messages with media now supports additional content types in a public beta, including Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and certain audio files. See this document more information on all the different media types we support.

When users message a business from a "Click to WhatsApp" advertisement, Twilio will now pass additional information to inbound message webhook regarding the advertisement the user clicked on. This allows businesses to create workflows in WhatsApp that intelligently respond based on the originating advertisement. Businesses can also better understand their advertisement’s performance by tracking user responses to an advertisement.

To learn more about the new properties that are included on our request to your webhook, visit https://www.twilio.com/docs/messaging/guides/webhook-request#whatsapp-specific-parameters.

If you face errors in submission or brand verification when you submit your brand details for A2P registration, you will now see a simplified step in the A2P wizard in TrustHub. The multiple steps to edit your brand earlier have been simplified into a single step in the console. This will help you save time in registering your A2P brand and allow you to focus on the most important fields to review. The new design also provides transparency on the number of retries remaining.

You can read more about brand editing here.

If your concerns are not addressed through the instructions shown in the wizard or if you are an ISV API user, you can refer to the new comprehensive guide for troubleshooting your A2P brand here.