Why marketing messages don't always arrive

A marketing broadcast can come back with some recipients marked failed and this reason:

#131049 This message was not delivered to maintain healthy ecosystem engagement.

Your template is fine. Your number is fine. Wap2b sent the message and Meta accepted it. Meta then decided not to hand it to that particular person.

This page is Meta's rule, not ours — it applies identically on every provider. The source is Meta's own documentation, linked at the bottom.

The rule

Meta caps how many marketing template messages a single WhatsApp user receives — counted across every business messaging them, not just you. In Meta's words:

WhatsApp may restrict the quantity of marketing template messages individual users receive from businesses during periods when they're unlikely to engage.

Two things decide it, both about the recipient rather than about you:

a dynamic view of an individual's recent marketing message read rate and how many messages they currently have in their inbox from friends, family, and businesses

So the person who reads their marketing messages receives more. The person whose inbox is full and who ignores them receives fewer. And:

The per-user marketing limit adapts automatically over time based on a person's recent engagement levels.

There is no published number

Meta does not disclose the limit, and it is not a fixed figure — it moves per person and over time. Any provider quoting you an exact "two per day" is guessing. You cannot plan around a number, only around the behaviour below.

What is and is not affected

	Subject to this limit?
Marketing templates	Yes
Utility templates	No
Authentication templates (OTPs)	No
Replies inside an open 24-hour window	No

This is the single most useful fact on the page, and it is why the category you choose matters far more than the wording you choose. See Why templates have to be approved.

This is not your number's messaging limit

Two different limits, easily confused:

Your messaging limit — how many conversations your number may start in 24 hours. Yours, tier-based, and it rises as you grow. See Messaging limits and quality rating.
The per-user marketing limit — how many marketing messages one recipient may receive from all businesses. Theirs, invisible to you, and nothing you do to your account changes it.

Hitting the first fails a whole run at once. Hitting the second fails scattered individuals inside an otherwise healthy broadcast.

Where it does not apply

Meta lists exceptions:

Per-user marketing template message limits are not currently active for messages sent from a business phone number in the European Economic Area, United Kingdom, Japan, or South Korea.

Note that this keys off where your business number is registered, not where the recipient is. An Indian number is covered by the limits.

Separately, and more absolute:

WhatsApp does not currently deliver marketing template messages to WhatsApp users with United States phone numbers.

Marketing to US numbers does not arrive at all. Utility and authentication templates are unaffected.

Do not resend

The one action that makes this actively worse:

If your WhatsApp Business account (WABA) attempts to resend marketing messages multiple times within a 24-hour period to users who have already reached their messaging limit, further delivery attempts to these users may be unavailable for up to 24 hours and error code 131049 will be returned.

One dropped message becomes a whole day of dropped messages for that person. Meta's guidance is to wait at least 24 hours before resending.

Resending a failed marketing broadcast is the wrong reflex

Re-running a broadcast against the recipients who returned 131049 does not recover them. It extends their block and burns the failed-attempt fee again.

What you are charged

Nothing for the message. When a send fails, the full message charge is refunded and a small failed-attempt fee is taken instead — ₹0.10 on Indian accounts. Both appear in Wallet.

What actually helps

Check the category is honest. The most common cause of chronic 131049 is a message that is not really marketing sitting in the Marketing category — an account notification, an activity alert, something the customer's own action triggered. If it genuinely reports an event on that customer's account, it belongs in Utility, where this limit does not apply. It has to be true: Meta re-categorises templates and repeatedly mislabelling marketing as utility damages your number.

Send to people who read you. The limit is set by the recipient's read rate. A list of contacts who never open anything is exactly the list Meta will throttle, and mailing it harder lowers the ceiling further.

Get replies. A reply opens a 24-hour window, and marketing sent inside it does not count against the limit at all. Quick-reply buttons on the template are the cheapest way to earn one.

Space out your sends. Every delivered marketing message spends part of that person's allowance. Three campaigns in a week compete with each other.

Read the per-recipient detail, not the total. Open the broadcast from Broadcasts and look at which recipients returned 131049. A handful is normal and not worth acting on. A large share means the category is wrong or the list is cold.

Source

Meta's official documentation for this behaviour: Per-user marketing template message limits, and the entry for 131049 in WhatsApp Cloud API error codes. Every quotation on this page is taken from those pages.