You Can Now Undo Accidentally Deleted WhatsApp Messages

BY Ronil

Published 21 Dec 2022

WhatsApp Messages

WhatsApp now lets you undo accidentally deleted messages. Since its launch over a decade ago as just an online texting platform, WhatsApp has come a long way, and it now lets you do more than chat with your contacts. Although there’s still room for improvement, WhatsApp is among the most used online messaging apps.

While the app was initially released in February 2009, it didn’t have the option to correct your mistake until 2017: the “delete for everyone” feature to delete a message with a typo or in case you sent something to someone it wasn’t meant for.

WhatsApp indeed took its time to bring it to the app, but it still has one issue—it provides two options: one lets you delete a message just for yourself, while the other deletes it for everyone. As a result, we all have been in a situation where we accidentally press the “Delete for me” option instead of the “Delete for everyone” button. It was frustrating, and WhatsApp has now finally fixed this issue by adding an undo button. This feature was first spotted in beta in August 2022, and now it’s available for the masses.

WhatsApp head, Will Cathcart, announced this new feature via Twitter, giving users a second chance to fix their mistakes. However, you will have to play fastest-fingers-first, as the “Undo” button floating notification only appears for five seconds. Of course, the five seconds limit might not be enough in some cases, but the company could increase the limit in the future. To recall, it only gave a few minutes initially to delete a message after sending it, and earlier this year, the service increased it to 60 hours.

This should be a welcome change considering there wasn’t a way to undo accidentally deleted messages before this update.