Product changelog and announcements

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.

A new Deactivations API for US Messaging is now available. This API returns you a file that contains phone numbers that have been removed from the US Carriers on the specified date. This allows you to automatically keep your subscriber lists clean by removing deactivated phone numbers from your campaigns.

For more information, please take a look at our Handling Deactivated Phone Numbers FAQ and our Deactivations API Documentation.

Starting October 14, Deleting a Message log will also automatically remove any Media objects associated with that message. 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 coming message records and media availability are published here.

Twilio Conversations (Chat and SMS channels), Programmable Chat, and Twilio Sync 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.

All Messaging Insights reports now contain 120 days of data. This data becomes visible upon choosing 120 days in the Date-Time picker dropdown within Messaging Insights available via the Programmable Messaging console.

This is an enhancement from the 30 days of data that we launched into General Availability in June and was one of the top three requests from early customers.

This release includes support for the expansion of Twilio’s Global Infrastructure via Edge Locations which allows connectivity control into and out of Twilio’s platform. These changes will provide an improved experience bringing Twilio’s public and private connectivity closer to your application.

Note: All these changes are backward compatible and will not impact existing configurations.

Programmable Messaging supports Edge Locations for connections to Twilio’s infrastructure via the Base URL in Twilio's API api.{edge}.us1.twilio.com.