The WhatsApp bug that prevents you from playing audios

We had not heard from serious WhatsApp failures for some time, and finally, the waiting time has been broken. The world’s largest messaging app has a hectic pace of updates, and now and then, we run into some problems.

The WhatsApp bug that prevents you from playing audiosDuring the last few days, some users have been reporting errors in the application related to reproducing the audios that we sent. It is not clear if the failure affects all users or not; however, the tests that we have done in the Andro4all team are enough to consider it appropriate to warn you and tell you what the solution to this problem is, which continues to affect some users even in 2021 is.

The WhatsApp error that prevents you from playing audios

The version of WhatsApp in which we have had this failure is the one that corresponds to the number 2.18.205. In this version, we have found a very serious problem, which prevents us from playing the audios that we have sent. However, it is not clear if the problem also occurs in later versions of the app.

As soon as we send audio, the terminal sends us the following message if we try to play it: Sorry, the multimedia file does not exist in your internal storage. WhatsApp cannot find the file we just sent and considers it lost as if we had deleted it. It is not fixed by closing the app, reinstalling it, or anything like that; the error persists.

Another error message can also be: Sorry, this audio cannot be loaded now. Please try again later.

How to solve the problem that WhatsApp audios are not heard

To solve the problem that prevents us from listening to WhatsApp audio, the first thing we must do is update the application’s version. For this, we recommend our article on how to update WhatsApp to the latest version

If you prefer, you can also uninstall WhatsApp and download the latest version of WhatsApp directly. Of course, before you should backup your chats if you do not want to lose all your conversations.

Once updated, try listening to the audio again. If all goes well, you should be able to hear them by now. If it still doesn’t work for you, it may be due to another problem such as:

  • WhatsApp is down: although it is not usual, it is not strange that a service used by millions of people around the world suffers a fall or technical failure. This can cause that at a given moment, you cannot hear audio. Visit our article to learn how to check if WhatsApp is down.
  • No Internet connection: Although it may seem obvious, sometimes we run out of coverage, or the Wi-Fi we are connected to cuts out. For this reason, if you cannot play the WhatsApp audios, check that you have an Internet connection, and try again.