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Ask WhatsApp whether this contact's number has an account

POST 
/api/contacts/:contact/reachability/whatsapp

Answers the question directly, without sending anything to the number.

This exists on ONE transport only. The Cloud API publishes no endpoint that answers it: the On-Premises API's POST /v1/contacts node did, and it went away with the On-Premises API itself (final client version expired 2025-10-23); nothing in the Cloud API reference replaced it. The contacts[].wa_id returned by POST /{phone-number-id}/messages is a receipt for a message already delivered and billed, not a lookup. The WhatsApp Web protocol behind a QR-linked line does carry it, so a tenant with a QR channel can ask and a tenant with only a Cloud channel cannot. presence.checkable on the reachability rows says which is which.

Deliberate and one contact at a time. Nothing bulk calls this: no import, no schedule, no list view. Bulk enumeration of phone numbers is what gets a QR-paired account banned, so the restraint is structural — throttled per contact (asked_recently), per line, and per route.

The result is written as an OBSERVATION with a timestamp, never as a property of the person. A provider outage records nothing at all.

Requires Contact view plus the conversations.reply permission.

Request​

Responses​

What we now know, and when we learned it.