Product changelog and announcements

Over the next few weeks, we are gradually rolling out MMS capabilities across our US Toll-Free numbers.

Starting this week, you will see numbers with MMS capabilities appear when you search for US(+1) Toll-Free phone numbers using Advanced Search. If you already own Toll-Free numbers, they will be enabled with MMS capabilities by the end of March as well.

You can send an MMS message on a Toll-Free number by including the MediaUrl parameter in your API request. Pricing information can be found here.

We will share another update once all Toll-Free numbers are generally available for sending and receiving MMS messages from recipients in US and Canada.

HTTP callbacks (webhooks) for inbound WhatsApp messages now include new ProfileName, WaId, Forwarded, and FrequentlyForwarded parameters. The ProfileName parameter contains the WhatsApp sender's profile name and the WaId parameter contains the WhatsApp ID of the contact sending the incoming message. For messages received that have been forwarded or forwarded many times the parameters Forwarded or FrequentlyForwarded, respectively, will appear with the value true.

Customers can now view the time taken by Twilio to process their messages via the Latency report visible in the Programmable Messaging Insights console.

Message latency is calculated as "Time Twilio sent the message - Time customer made message request API call." Customers can also view the limits applied to their individual senders, messaging services, and accounts via Modals in the Insights report.

This blog contains details about the product and this new guide explains how applications can be built to handle scale from the beginning.

As your messaging volumes grow, you can now monitor the latency introduced in sending messages using the Latency Report in Messaging Insights. This can be particularly helpful in high-traffic times like promotions for Black-Friday, or emergency notification situations. The Latency Report is available to all Messaging Customers at no cost via the Messaging Insights console.

As part of the effort to increase transparency on Messaging Latency, there is now a new guide for scaling and two new filters available as part of Insights - latency buckets and time-ranges of 5-minutes and 4 hours. The blog with this announcement is available here.

Deleting a Message log will now automatically remove any Media objects associated with that message whenever applicable. For media objects that are associated to multiple messages, Twilio will continue to store a copy until all messages refering to the media object are deleted. This allows a more intuitive experience when customers issue delete requests on messages containing media. The change will apply to all messaging channels supporting media including MMS, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

More details of the changes to message records and media availability and deletion are published here.

Customers will be able to view message logs in Console--and retrieve the resources via GET to the /Messages endpoint--for thirteen months after the message is created. This represents a significant change as these logs were permanently stored by Twilio and retrievable via Console and API indefinitely before this change.

If you view logs in Console there is no follow up action, but just be aware that messages will now only display logs for 13 months.

All past message records older than thirteen months will still be backed up within Twilio and available to be retrieved using the Bulk Export utility (except for media older than 13 months).

This change will be reflected as a Data Access Policy Setting of "400 days" in the Messaging Console Settings page. If you perform log extraction via API on a rolling basis, it is important to verify that you are pulling the logs at a frequency that will remain unaffected by this change.

In case there is an urgent need to access older data via the API, customers may contact support for case-by-case extensions till Oct 31, 2020.

Twilio's support for the WhatsApp Business API is now Generailly Available! In addition to meeting Twilio’s SLA standards for GA products, this change represents an improvement in the product experience, support and resilience, as well as a commitment to offer WhatsApp as a first-class citizen across Twilio products.

To try WhatsApp, head over to Twilio Sandbox for WhatsApp. To get your own number, follow the onboarding instructions to connect your WhatsApp number. Once you are live, you can send and receive WhatsApp messages using the Programmable Messaging API or the Conversations API.

As part of Twilio's support for WhatsApp Business API being made Generally Available, Twilio has redesigned the templates console experience and added support for translations. Here's what's new:

Message templates now have a dedicated page. Navigate to Programmable Messaging > Senders > WhatsApp Templates to submit and view your templates.

Support for translations. Each message template now supports multiple versions across different languages. Instead of submitting one new template for each language, you can now add multiple translations under a single template. WhatsApp limits each account to 250 templates by default, but each template can now contain multiple languages, so this significantly expands the number of messages available to sent as notifications.

Template naming. You can now name each template. This provides context to your template submission and can increase your chances of approval with WhatsApp.

For more info about WhatsApp message templates, please refer to this article.

Policy updated as of September 28, 2020

Twilio anticipates significant spikes in provisioning of US-based phone numbers as we approach November's 2020 U.S. election. Due to the finite capacity of the U.S. messaging ecosystem, we're implementing a Heightened Awareness Period (HAP) from October 2, 2020 until November 4, 2020. Our goal for this short-term policy is to ensure that all customers have fair access to a secure and reliable network.

During this Heightened Awareness Period, the following limitations will apply:

Account-level long code SMS rate limits have been implemented based on the amount of phone numbers:

• Customers with 2,000 or more 10-digit long code numbers on their project can send up to 2,000 MPS toward the United States.
• Customers with 100,000 or more 10-digit long code numbersas of October 2, 2020 on their project can send up to 4,000 MPS toward the United States. Twilio reserves the right to move the effective date of October 2, 2020 to an earlier date if too much capacity is allocated to customers, putting the network at risk.

For more details, please refer to this FAQ.

Twilio now supports sending up to 25 messages per second through WhatsApp.

If messages are sent at a rate higher than 25 MPS, Twilio maintains a queue. For very high outbound message volumes, messages can remain queued for up to 4 hours.

To achieve higher MPS, you can use Messaging Services. This allows you to distribute high volume across many WhatsApp senders within the Messaging Service.

Read more about MPS in our Best Practices guide.