Ofcom fines Meta £450,000 for wrong WhatsApp Business data, five times over

Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, has fined Meta £450,000 after finding that the company gave inaccurate information about its WhatsApp Business service in answer to five questions across two statutory information notices, according to Ofcom’s case page.

Five contraventions across two formal notices

Ofcom issued a Confirmation Decision to Meta Platforms, Inc. under section 139A of the Communications Act 2003 on 9 November 2026. The non-confidential version was published on 12 November. The regulator found five contraventions, each tied to a question Meta answered inaccurately.

The questions came from two notices under section 135 of the Act, sent on 31 July 2024 and 19 June 2025, with three clarifying requests in between. Ofcom used the answers for its monitoring of the retail business messaging market and for its Wholesale A2P SMS Termination Market Review. The notices concerned WhatsApp Business.

Ofcom says it applied a 25% discount to the penalty because Meta admitted liability and completed its settlement process. Reuters reported that the starting figure was £600,000, which matches the discounted amount. Reuters also reported that some inaccuracies went uncorrected for up to 11 months. The Ofcom page summary we read does not state that duration, so treat it as Reuters’ account.

Meta told media it takes its regulatory obligations seriously and cooperated fully with the investigation, as reported in syndicated coverage of the decision.

Who is affected and what happens next

The fine falls on Meta alone, and nothing changes for people or businesses using WhatsApp. The decision concerns the quality of data handed to a regulator, not how the product works. The Ofcom page does not set out any further steps after the penalty, although it says it will post updates as the investigation progresses, and the case is still listed as open.

Ofcom opened the investigation on 23 January 2026 under reference CW/01329/11/25. At that point it said the information it had received might not have been complete and accurate. Meta said then that it would cooperate. The decision arrives about ten months later.

A reminder that accuracy is a legal duty

Section 135 notices are compulsory. A company that receives one must answer completely and correctly, and failure can trigger enforcement under the Communications Act. The case shows Ofcom treating wrong answers as a breach in their own right, separate from whatever the data was used for.

The data mattered because Ofcom was assessing a market where WhatsApp Business competes with traditional business text messaging. A2P stands for application-to-person messaging, the automated texts that companies send to customers. Regulators rely on figures from the largest platforms to judge such a market, and Ofcom had to depend on Meta’s answers for the WhatsApp side of that picture.

The settlement route is also telling. By admitting liability and completing Ofcom’s process, Meta received a 25% reduction. Ofcom’s page does not say how the final figure compares with the maximum penalty available, so the size of the fine against the legal ceiling is not established here.

What the sources do not settle

The material we read does not explain why the errors occurred, which specific figures were wrong, or whether Ofcom’s final market review changed as a result. Meta’s description of its own conduct comes from its public statement and has not been independently verified. For AI-focused readers, the relevance is the wider pattern: as regulators in the UK and elsewhere gather data on messaging and platform markets, the reliability of what large companies submit is itself now being enforced.