I am trying to send an audio message using the Whatsapp Cloud-api, but I am now dealing with a problem that seems to have no documentation available.

Overview of the issue

  • I send an audio file (mp3) to whatsapp as described here.
  • I verify that the file was sent correctly by downloading the file using the media download endpoint.
  • I then try to send the audio as a message using the endpoint specified here.
  • I receive a webhook request with information about my message, this request informs me that the message failed because of "Media file scrutiny for the file failed with mediaEngineStatus: 0" with the code "131053".

Different things I tried

I tried searching the error code in the documentation, it can be found in this page, the page recommends me to verify the type of the audio files I'm using so I used the file --mime-type command in linux an confirmed that the mp3 is actually an mp3.


I tried using the .ogg format instead of mp3 since audio's on whatsapp by default are of type .ogg. The way I did that was that I sent an audio to myself, download the audio, and tried using it instead. The webhook returned the same thing. I also verified the type of the .ogg file using file --mime-type


I tried sending a hello world template message to myself first, responding that message, and then sending the audio, I tried this step since in the whatsapp documentation it is explained that audio messages can only be sent after someone answers the template message. The webhook still returned the same thing.


I stopped using my own code to do this and started using the Insomnia rest client to do the requests to the whatsapp API to make sure that my code was not a factor in this error, I then repeated all the tests explained above using only the Insomnia, I still had my code receive the webhook results since Insomnia is not capable of doing that, but the results were still the same.


I then decided to use ffmpeg to convert my .mp3 to .mp3 and my .ogg to .ogg in an attempt at guaranteeing the type of the files I was sending despite the action seeming to be redundant. I then repeated all tests using both my code and Insomnia but there was no luck and the results were still the same.

A few key points that I already checked

  • I am using multipart/mime both in Insomnia and my code to send the file and the part about uploading the file works well in both situations
  • The audio does not get corrupted after being sent to the whatsapp API since it can be dowloaded and i can listen to it after.

Why no code in the question

I decided to not add any of my code in this question because I only want an explanation on why this is happening on Insomnia, since it is a standard rest client and it should work as far as I can tell, after I manage to make it work in insomnia I will make the requests work in the same way using my code. This seems to me to be an easier task then trying to change the way my code is doing it from the start.

Bellow I have the requests i sent using insomnia (with private info removed for the print screen)

Tag:mime-types, whatsapp, facebook-graph-api, whatsapp-cloud-api

Only one comment.

  1. General Grievance

    After Analyzing I found that the recorded voice or media has problem. Try to send other files.

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