WhatsApp has been one of the most prominent instant messengers in the world since its launch. The ability to work on 2G networks, send photos and videos, share locations and more were all unheard of features when the service first launched. When WhatsApp first introduced the ability to delete sent messages, it was considered impressive and no wonder it was soon adopted by most of its competitors in the market.

But what if you accidentally delete a message on WhatsApp? Can you still get it back? The company must have figured something out? Let’s find out!

Technically yes, but not in the way you might think. You can recover deleted messages from your cloud or local backup, as long as you have a recent backup available. However, if your last backup is older than when you received/sent the deleted message, you will not be able to recover your deleted message. If you don’t have backups set up yet, there is no way to recover your messages because you don’t have them in a backup.

You may come across a number of third-party apps that claim to be able to recover your deleted messages, but that is simply not possible. WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, which means that the app needs to gain access to your encryption key or, long story short, bypass the encryption. This carries the risk of putting your private data at risk indefinitely and hence we advise against opting for such tools. Furthermore, there is currently no evidence or review showing that any of these tools live up to their promises.