I’m having a weird problem with my Telegram bot webhook. When I send a batch of photos from my phone (let’s say 3 or 4 images at once), my webhook endpoint gets flooded with way more requests than expected. Instead of receiving 4 image updates, I’m getting like 15-20 duplicate calls.
My current setup:
$webhook_data = TelegramAPI::retrieveWebhookData();
Log::info("Received webhook data: " . $webhook_data);
The code is pretty basic but somehow the webhook keeps getting bombarded with the same photo objects over and over. Has anyone experienced this issue before? What could be causing this behavior?
sounds like your webhook timing out, yeah. telegram resends if it doesn’t get that fast http 200. try putting http_response_code(200); right at the start of your script before any processing. also, peek at your server logs for any errors messin with the requests.
Same thing happened to me - I was handling media groups wrong. Telegram sends separate updates for each photo in a batch, but they all have the same media_group_id. You’re not seeing duplicates, just individual updates for each image. I fixed it by grouping updates with matching media_group_ids and adding a small delay before processing. Just use an array to collect all photos with the same media_group_id, then process the whole batch once no new updates come in for a few seconds. Stopped the flood of individual photo processing and made my webhook way more efficient.
Classic webhook retry issue. Telegram retries when your endpoint doesn’t return a 200 status fast enough. Had this exact problem six months ago with slow media group processing. You need to respond with HTTP 200 immediately, before you finish processing the images. I restructured my code to acknowledge the webhook first, then threw the actual image processing into an async queue. Check if your server’s timing out or if network latency is making Telegram think the webhook failed. Also verify if you’re getting duplicate photo objects or just the same media group retried multiple times. Use the update_id field for deduplication - simple check that filters out real duplicates.