How do I delete queued messages in Twilio?

Question

We had a problem and long story short we sent out multiple duplicate messages to 800 recipients. Currently getting calls and complaints of spamming.

I can find no way through the twilio dashboard to remove these queued messages. There are over 1200 messages queued but no way to "cancel" them. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

I had this situation where my app which was programmed to automatically respond if you text the configured number, had gotten into a "conversation" with another bot configured with a phone number which also automatically responds, hence they were texting each other every second and racking up a bill.

Though I knew the CID of the third party number, you can't block specific senders. You can block all incoming messages by disabling the configuration of the designated number.

I was able to disable the SMS configuration as described here by configuring the number with a blank webhook, and thereby stop incoming messages, but by the time I realized I had a queue of thousands of outgoing messages I needed to cancel.

Twilio Support, unless on a paid plan is not time sensitive, and as mentioned by @philnash there's no way to cancel queued messages in the console (why not???) leaving you at Twilio support's mercy.

However I did manage to clear the queue by sacrificing and releasing the from number used in the API call from my project used to queue those messages. Immediately after releasing the number the billing stopped and the queue cleared.

I was thinking I can possibly have accomplished the same effect if I had transferred the number to another Twilio account which you can do via API as described here

Answer 2

Twilio developer evangelist here.

I believe you have also written into support, which was the right move. There is no way to manually cancel messages that are in the queue from the dashboard or the API, but support will be able to help you out.