AKServices Incident Note — 18 Nov 2025
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Title: WhatsApp OTP throttling
Severity: Minor customer impact (11% delayed logins)
Start: 18 Nov 2025, 18:42 IST
End: 18 Nov 2025, 19:00 IST
Duration: 18 minutes

Summary
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Meta-owned WhatsApp Business API began rate-limiting template sends from our primary number, causing login OTP delivery to slow down during peak retailer usage. Roughly 11% of OTP requests breached the 60-second SLA.

Customer Impact
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- Login OTPs delayed up to 4 minutes for a portion of evening users.
- No evidence of OTP loss or duplication.
- SMS/email fallbacks had not auto-engaged for this template, so frontline staff contacted support.

Root Cause
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The OTP template crossed WhatsApp's quality threshold because of a sudden forex-related spam campaign targeting the same template category. Meta applied an automated tier downgrade.

Fix & Mitigations
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1. Forced email fallback + SMS backup for all OTP requests while issue persisted.
2. Swapped to pre-approved "OTP_FALLBACK_V2" template tied to an alternate WABA number.
3. Raised a quality appeal and enabled automatic channel rotation if queue >45 seconds.

Follow-up Actions
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- Add synthetic monitoring that fires alerts once WhatsApp latency >25 seconds.
- Documented runbook in NOTIFICATION_SYSTEM_FINAL.md.
- Scheduled review with Meta partner manager on 20 Nov 2025.