I’m having trouble with my Telegram bot’s update retrieval functionality. I built a bot a few weeks back and everything was working perfectly at first. However, I’ve noticed something weird happening with the getUpdates endpoint.
When I make a request to:
https://api.telegram.org/bot<MY_TOKEN>/getUpdates
The response comes back empty - no messages are returned at all. But here’s the strange part: when I create a brand new bot and use the same API call, it works perfectly and shows all the messages just like my original bot did in the beginning.
Is there some kind of time limit or expiration period that affects how long the getUpdates method continues to function? And if so, is there any way to restore this functionality for my existing bot?
You probably set up a webhook for your Telegram bot by accident. Once a webhook’s active, Telegram stops sending updates through getUpdates and sends them to your webhook URL instead. I ran into this same issue when testing different bot setups. Even if the webhook isn’t working, Telegram keeps trying to send updates there, so they won’t show up in getUpdates. Just call deleteWebhook to turn it off, then check getUpdates again. You can use getWebhookInfo to see if there’s still a webhook configured.
sounds like you hit the update limit or your bot token got refreshed. Telegram drops updates if you don’t poll regularly. restart your polling process and make sure you’re doing regular getUpdates calls. Also check that your bot token didn’t change in BotFather - people accidentally regenerate tokens all the time.
Check your offset parameter in the getUpdates API call. Telegram only keeps pending updates for 24 hours - if your offset points to older updates, you’ll get an empty response. I ran into this exact issue when tweaking offset values during development. Try calling getUpdates without any offset to grab the latest updates, or set offset=0 to start fresh. Also, if your bot’s been sitting idle for a while, those older updates are probably already gone from Telegram’s servers.