WhatsApp messages stopped arriving. Your first move is diagnosis, not a second number.
When customer messages suddenly stop, establish whether the failure affects the WhatsApp Business Platform broadly, your business account, or the integration that receives messages. Rushing customers to an unprepared channel can create duplicate cases and leave urgent requests without an owner.
A continuity plan cannot guarantee zero downtime. Its purpose is to make three things explicit: who diagnoses the incident, how urgent requests are captured temporarily, and how the team resumes follow-up without losing context.
Three different failures require three different responses
Platform incident. Multiple numbers or services appear affected and official status signals point to a disruption. Check Meta's status page before changing your own configuration.
Account or permission issue. A business account or message template has been restricted, or access permissions have changed. Review the account's status and administrative access instead of assuming the API itself is unavailable.
Internal delivery issue. Webhooks are not reaching your application, the message intake service has stopped, or employees have lost inbox access. Inspect your own event logs and receiving workflow.
A failed message alone does not identify the cause. Record when the first failure appeared, the affected channel, the error, and whether both inbound and outbound messaging are impacted.
A fallback process a small team can actually run
Assign one incident owner. Prepare a secondary contact route that the business already operates, such as its website contact form or published phone line. Do not silently switch customers to an outreach channel they have not agreed to use. Put a clear temporary notice on your website with a reliable way to reach the team.
Keep a temporary register for consequential requests: time received, responsible employee, problem summary, permitted contact route and last action. If the same request arrives through two channels, retain both sources until identity is confirmed rather than merging records based on a name.
Prioritize time-sensitive appointments, paid orders and urgent complaints. For general questions, acknowledge the delay and provide a realistic next review point rather than promising an unsupported recovery time.
Restore service without doubling every message
Once the platform or integration recovers, test authorized inbound and outbound messages and verify that their states update correctly. Reconcile the temporary register with messages delivered late.
For each case, ask whether the customer has already received an answer elsewhere, whether an employee owns it, and whether the next step remains open. Do not blast every pending follow-up at once. Recheck consent and current messaging rules before sending outbound messages.
Rehearse the plan
Run an illustrative exercise in which WhatsApp is unavailable for two hours. Ask the team to log five test requests, assign owners and reconcile them afterward without duplication. These numbers are training choices, not downtime statistics or industry benchmarks.
Document what broke: Was the fallback contact route unclear? Did two employees work on the same case? Was messaging permission lost? Improve the process and test it again.
What this means for Mr. AI
The current Mr. AI FAQ describes WhatsApp, Messenger and website chat support, summaries, follow-up and human intervention. That does not establish guaranteed automatic failover across channels or continued WhatsApp operation during a Meta outage. Treat business continuity as a separate operational plan and verify each available capability in your own setup.
See our customer support shift handover guide for keeping ownership clear during interruptions. You can also try Mr. AI with non-sensitive test cases.
Reference sources: Meta service status and the WhatsApp Business developer hub. These are global diagnostic resources, not Egypt-specific outage statistics.
