Actions repeating multiple times despite single button press (unique update_ids)

[sudovag3]

Good evening! We're facing a serious issue with our Telegram bot: clients are complaining that a certain action is repeated multiple times, even though they have pressed the corresponding button only once.

Initially, we suspected a bug in our code. To investigate, we enabled extensive logging of all user actions. Our bot operates via webhooks. When the issue occurred again, the logs showed that each user action had a unique update_id. Therefore, it appears there is no error in our code logic.

However, the user insists that they only pressed the button once (triggering one update), then closed Telegram. When they reopened the app, the action repeated itself without any additional input from the user.

I have a couple of questions:

• Has anyone encountered a similar problem? If so, how did you resolve it?
• Am I correct in understanding that the update_id is generated on Telegram’s side and is meant to uniquely identify user actions relative to the bot?

I would really appreciate any insights or suggestions on this matter. Thank you in advance for your help!

[levlam]

The update_id uniquely identifies a callback query request from the user's app.

If the user closed the app before it received response to the callback query, then the app must re-sent the query again after network connection is established to receive the response. This implies that bots can receive the query multiple times. This happens often for callback queries from iOS app users.