Nasty WhatsApp bug let users access 'View Once' photos multiple times

WhatsApp has a feature for those moments when you want to share something, but don't want it to stick around. Called "View Once," the feature lets you send a photo or a video to someone; after they've seen it, the content is gone forever.

That, at least, is how the feature should work, but a recently discovered bug — fixed in the last version of iOS — allowed users to see "View Once" content as many times as they wanted.

First publicly described in a blog post last week by cybersecurity researcher Ramshath, the bug was extremely easy to exploit as it required no technical knowledge to do so. If someone had sent you a "View Once" image or video, all you had to do to access it again was go to Settings > Storage and Data > Manage Storage. If you then found the sender's chat and sorted the storage by "Newest," the "View Once" content was still accessible.

The bug only affected iPhone users, which is still a huge demographic, making this issue a pretty big privacy mishap by WhatsApp and its parent company, Meta.

Ramshath claims he reported the issue to Meta through the company's bug bounty program, to which Meta replied that it was already aware of the issue and working on a fix.

Indeed, the fix arrived fairly quickly, with WhatsApp version 25.2.3 on iOS. Users are advised to update to the latest version — especially if they want their "View Once" content to keep working as it should.

This is not the first time WhatsApp has had issues with the "View Once" feature. In September 2024, security researchers found that the disappeared content was still available by entering the exact URL of the media file, as it was still insecurely stored on WhatsApp's servers. This issue (which was followed by another, similar problem with the "View Once feature) was since fixed by WhatsApp.