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You can now deliver one-time passcodes over WhatsApp, alongside SMS and email. WhatsApp OTPs are sent from the shared Bird Authifly sender — the same "Authifly" brand you already see on our shared email sender — using the built-in authentication template, so there's no template or sender setup required. Support for your own dedicated senders is following shortly.

What's new

• Enable WhatsApp per country from the Verify → Countries settings in the dashboard.
• Automatic failover: if the primary channel can't deliver, Verify falls back through your configured channels before giving up.
• API & SDK: whatsapp is now a valid value for a verification's channel, and country routes accept a whatsapp key in their per-channel settings. This is additive — no breaking change.

Default routing change

Existing phone verifications now default to SMS → WhatsApp → email: SMS stays primary, with WhatsApp as an automatic fallback before email. Countries you've already customized are left untouched.

WhatsApp lifecycle events are no longer poll-only. Subscribe to any whatsapp.* event type from the dashboard's Webhooks page or with POST /v1/webhooks, and Bird pushes the same accepted, sent, delivered, read, and failed events you'd otherwise fetch from GET /v1/whatsapp/messages/{message_id}/events. Each delivery carries whatsapp_id, workspace_id, the message direction, from/to addresses (phone number and/or Meta business-scoped user ID), and the tags and metadata from the original send; failed messages include an error object with a Bird-stable failure code. See WhatsApp events.

Also in this release:

• Inbound email messages (get, list) now return an authentication field (pass, fail, or unknown) giving a single verdict on whether the sender's identity was verified, alongside the existing SPF/DKIM/DMARC flags.
• New guide: Plan changes & renewals spells out exactly when plan upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations take effect, and the day-by-day sequence for a failed renewal payment. It also documents that overage on paid plans is capped at 5x your plan's included email volume per period, with sends rejected past that ceiling until the period resets; the Free plan has no overage at all.

Bird Verify is now available to every workspace. Send a one-time passcode and confirm the code your user enters in two API calls — no sender to register, and no verification id to store.

Getting started

• Verify your first customer
• Verify overview
• Sending verifications

What's available

• Send and check: start a verification with POST /v1/verify/verifications — which also resends after the cooldown — then confirm the code with the check endpoint. A code can be checked once.
• Email and SMS with failover: pick the channels and their order; if the first channel can't deliver, Verify falls back to the next one on the same code budget.
• Per-country configuration: set channel availability and order, per-country senders, and a verified-domain email sender — a per-workspace overlay on Bird's per-country base.
• Built-in safety: code length and lifetime, maximum attempts, resend cooldown, and per-recipient and per-workspace rate limits, all configurable.
• Everywhere you build: the Verify API, the dashboard (onboarding, verifications log, countries, and configuration), the bird verify CLI, the Bird MCP server, and the Go, TypeScript, and Python SDKs.

More is on the way — WhatsApp and voice channels, dedicated senders, and customer-authored templates among them.

The WhatsApp Metrics page is out of "coming soon" and live in the dashboard at WhatsApp → Metrics. It's the aggregate view of your channel that the per-message message log can't give you: delivery rate and failure rate measured against fixed thresholds (95% and 5%), accepted volume, and cost, over the last 24 hours, 7, 30, or 90 days.

Below the summary tiles:

• A delivery-over-time chart of accepted, delivered, and failed volume, to spot spikes and bad sends.
• A failure-rate trend line plus a histogram of failures by Bird-normalized error code.
• Delivery latency, Bird's own processing time from accepting a message to handing it to the WhatsApp network, at p50/p95/p99.
• Breakdowns by sending number, template category, and tag, each with its own Healthy/Watching/Throttled status.

Alongside it, WhatsApp's rate limits now have their own reference page: a dedicated whatsapp_send group (10/min base) for sending, kept separate from the shared list/read/write management limits so send quota is never eaten by management traffic.

Bird launches a headless signup path for agents that don't already have a Bird account. Three commands take an agent from nothing to a stored, working credential: bird auth signup creates the account and emails a six-digit code, bird auth verify-email confirms it and returns a one-time onboarding ticket, and bird auth create-org consumes that ticket to create the first organization and workspace. No browser and no dashboard involved at any step. The same flow is exposed as the signup, verify_email, and create_org tools on the MCP server. See Self-serve signup.

Also in this release:

• The dashboard's navigation is redesigned around a left sidebar: channels are grouped under Products (Voice, Push, Lookup, and Realtime now sit in a coming-soon row), shared records live under Resources (Contacts, Numbers, Verification), and API Keys, Webhooks, and Logs are pinned at the bottom and stay visible no matter which channel you're in. See the dashboard tour.
• WhatsApp message endpoints (get, list, list message events, send) now return last_error.meta_error_code, the raw error code from the WhatsApp Cloud API, for lower-level debugging of failed sends.
• Corrected docs: enabling email receiving on a domain is dashboard-only, through the Receiving toggle on the domain's detail page. The previously documented PATCH /v1/email/domains/{domain_id} call for this doesn't do that. Separately, the 422 error returned for preview email fields (references, attachment path, contact_id, topic_id) used ahead of general availability is UnsupportedEmailFeature, not unsupported_feature as previously documented.