Changes to Facebook Messenger features and API in the European Economic Area

To comply with new privacy rules in Europe, Facebook will be making updates to their Facebook Messenger platform that will impact application(s) using Facebook Messenger via the Vonage Messages API.

Beginning 16 December 2020, certain Facebook Messenger features will no longer be available for businesses and users in Europe who connect with businesses globally. This impacts the 27 European Union member states, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and the United Kingdom.

You can find the full list of affected features and APIs (and potential mitigations suggested by Facebook) at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/europe-updates#affected

Features affected include, but are not limited to:

Users can not send media attachments, other than images, to a business

Any non-image media/attachments in new messages won’t render in the thread

Receipt template, Airline template, Shops product template and One Time Notifications (OTN) templates won’t render in the message thread

Attachments sent by a user will not be received by you/your applications (you will get an “attachment unavailable fallback payload”)

Delivered / Read receipts will no longer be sent; Note: This will impact integrations with the Vonage Dispatch API

From 16 December 2020, the impacted Facebook APIs and UI components will be unavailable and we encourage you to update your applications and processes that could be affected by these changes as soon as possible.

Facebook has said they are working hard to bring these features back and they will provide an update on their progress in the near future.

Further Questions
If you are having problems with either of these changes please reach out to our support team at support@nexmo.com.