Skip to main content
All CollectionsWhatsApp
WhatsApp Single Tick for a long time?
WhatsApp Single Tick for a long time?

A single gray tick in WhatsApp for a long time means your message was sent but not delivered, often due to connectivity or recipient issues.

Velma Dinkley avatar
Written by Velma Dinkley
Updated over a week ago

Reasons for WhatsApp Single Tick For a Long Time

In WhatsApp, a single gray tick (✓) typically indicates that your message has been sent from your device, but it hasn't been successfully delivered to the recipient's device. There are several reasons why a message might only have a single tick:

  1. No Internet Connection: If either you or the recipient doesn't have an active internet connection, the message won't be delivered until a connection is established.

  2. Recipient's Phone Off or Out of Coverage: If the recipient's phone is turned off or out of network coverage, the message can't be delivered until their phone is back online.

  3. Blocked Contact: If you are blocked by the recipient, your messages will only show one tick, indicating that they were sent but not delivered.

  4. Contact Deleted Your Number: If the recipient has deleted your contact from their phone, your messages might not be delivered even if you have their number saved.

  5. Temporary WhatsApp Server Issues: Sometimes, WhatsApp experiences server issues, causing messages to be delayed or not delivered immediately.

  6. Message Not Sent Properly: In some cases, issues with the message itself, such as large file sizes or unsupported formats, can prevent it from being delivered. Try compressing the file or changing formats, then send again.

If your message has been stuck with a single tick for an extended period, it's usually a good idea to check your internet connection, ensure your contact's phone is on, and consider trying to send the message again. If the issue persists, it might be a problem on the recipient's end or a temporary WhatsApp server issue.

Checking the delivery status of a message in Spur

If you're using the WhatsApp API then Spur also records many more reasons why your WhatsApp messages are not delivered and displays them in our shared inbox.

Per User Marketing Limits

For WhatsApp API, among all the reasons for non-delivery, the most common one is "Per User Marketing Limits." Read more about marketing limits of WhatsApp here.

More about Frequency Capping by Meta

So this error code is 131026. That means when you sent this message via Spur, it was successfully sent, but it wasn't delivered due to:

  1. Frequency capping by Meta

  2. Number is not on WhatsApp

What is Frequency Capping? To create high-quality user experiences and maximize marketing template message engagement, Meta limits the number of marketing template messages a person receives from any business in a given period of time, starting with a few conversations that are less likely to be read. Note that the limit is determined based on the number of marketing template messages that person has already received from any business, and is not related to your business specifically.

What does Spur do about it? Whenever a message is not delivered due to Frequency Capping, Spur automatically retries to send the message again in the next 24 hours. We do this by identifying potential opportunities when the user can potentially receive the message. This has helped to boost delivery rates from 45% to 80-85% for many of our customers. Read more about it here

But if the customer is not on WhatsApp, the message will, of course, not be delivered. And 131026 errors also comes up when customer is not on WhatsApp, there is no separate error code for numbers not on WhatsApp.

How to know if a number is not on WhatsApp?

In the Spur Shared inbox, you can just click on the number of the customer. Clicking on it will take you to the WhatsApp chat with that number using a Click to Chat wa.me link.

Enlarged view

Enlarged view

If the number exists, WhatsApp will open a chat with that number. If it does not, the above error will pop up.

WhatsApp Payment Failures

131042: There was an error related to your payment method.

You'll get the above error when you will try to send a message with WhatsApp and have failed payments or card is not added to your WhatsApp business account. We have a dedicated guide on solving WhatsApp payment issues.

Did this answer your question?