Blocking a contact in chat

When you don’t want someone to be able to send you direct messages anymore — a former coworker, a contact who keeps pinging after a project ended, anyone — you can block them from inside the chat. Blocking matches the semantics most people expect from WhatsApp: one-way, silent, reversible, and limited to 1:1 chats.

How to block

Open the 1:1 chat with the person you want to block. In the chat header, between the bell (mute) icon and the contact’s avatar, you’ll see a small circle-with-slash icon. Click it, confirm in the dialog, and the block lands.

They can no longer send you new direct messages. Their composer shows “You can’t message this contact.”
They can still see prior history. Block doesn’t delete anything.
They’re not notified. There’s no “You have been blocked” banner or email — the only signal they get is the disabled composer when they open the chat.
You can still send to them. Blocking is from your side, gating their inbound, not your outbound. If you want a fully silent break, just don’t open the chat.

Groups are unaffected

If you and the blocked person share any group conversations (internal team groups or external client groups), both of you can still see and send messages in those groups. Block was deliberately scoped to 1:1 chats — extending it to shared groups would create awkward holes in conversations third parties are also part of.

Unblocking

You can unblock from two places. Inside the same chat, the icon now appears in rose with a shield-off glyph; click it and confirm Unblock. Or go to /settings/chat-blocks for the full list of everyone you’ve blocked, with a one-click Unblock per row. Either path restores normal messaging immediately.

Privacy details

Blocked users are hidden from start-chat search — when you go to start a new DM, blocked contacts won’t appear in the typeahead picker, even if they’re still workspace members. They reappear automatically once you unblock.

Cross-workspace DMs respect block too. If you block someone in a DIRECT_CROSS_WORKSPACE chat, the gate applies regardless of which workspace they’re in.

Notifications, @mentions, and the bell badge — to mute someone without blocking them
Manage blocked contacts