Upcoming Removal of WhatsApp-specific “ReferralNumMedia” Webhook Property for Inbound SMS/MMS Messages

On Thursday, January 12th, 2023 at 9:00am PST, Twilio’s request to the webhook URL configured for a phone number will no longer contain the ReferralNumMedia property for SMS and MMS messages. This parameter is only relevant for WhatsApp messages generated from Meta’s “Click-to-WhatsApp” ads. It was previously incorrectly added to all messages, but will only be returned on WhatsApp messages going forward.

Twilio recommends that customers validate Twilio’s requests to their webhook URL by following this guide, making sure to pass all parameters sent to the webhook URL without filtering to the validateRequest call. Twilio strongly discourages validating based on the presence (or absence) of certain parameters.

Update: This is now completed. SMS and MMS messages will no longer have the ReferralNumMedia property sent to the SMS Webhook URL.