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Tuesday, November 3, 2026

Excellentia

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India

AI agent startup Instinct blames configuration issue for WhatsApp disruption

Reports of banned accounts have put Meta's stance on outside AI agents under scrutiny.

A person using WhatsApp on a smartphone
File photo: Helar Lukats / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)

Instinct, a startup whose personal AI agent works inside WhatsApp, says a recent outage came from a misconfiguration on its own side.

Some users also reported being banned, which has put Meta's policy on outside AI agents under the spotlight. WhatsApp has more users in India than in any other country, so how the rules are applied matters to Indian developers and customers.

Excellentia summary of reporting by The Indian Express. Read the original for full details.