WhatsApp restricted or low quality rating: what to do in Voltade
Your WhatsApp messages fail with error 131049 or stop delivering. Your account is not banned. Here is what a low quality rating means and what to do about it in Voltade.
Updated
Meta discontinued the Flagged and Restricted phone-number statuses on 7 October 2025. A number that is sending is either connected or it is not, and the quality rating is a separate signal from your messaging limit.
1. Pause your broadcasts
If you have active broadcast campaigns in Voltade, pause them. Volume against an audience that is blocking you is what moves the rating.
2. Turn off proactive messaging
If your AI agent or automation starts conversations rather than replying to them, turn that off for now. Reply-based automation can stay on.
3. Review your recent broadcasts
In Voltade, open your broadcast history and check three things:
- Which campaigns had low read and reply rates
- Which campaigns went to contacts who had not messaged you recently
- Which templates repeated the same message to the same contacts
The quality rating is calculated from the messages your customers received over the past seven days, so it moves as that window moves. Meta publishes no recovery period, and no duration for any penalty tied to a low rating.
What Meta does publish is the messaging limit, which is separate. Limits sit on the business portfolio and are shared by every phone number in it: 2,000, 10,000, 100,000 and Unlimited unique customers in a moving 24-hour period. A portfolio moves up one level within six hours when it is sending high-quality messages and has used at least half its current limit in the last seven days.
Error 131049 reads "This message was not delivered to maintain healthy ecosystem engagement." It is not an account penalty. It is the per-user marketing template limit: Meta caps how many marketing templates one WhatsApp user receives in a period when that person is less likely to read them, based on their recent read rate and how full their inbox is. The cap adapts per recipient.
Meta's instruction is to wait at least 24 hours before resending a marketing template to a contact who has hit their limit. Retrying inside that window makes it worse: repeated attempts can make delivery to that contact unavailable for a further 24 hours.
Read our longer guide for prevention, the common mistakes and the recovery steps in detail:
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