Messenger error 2018218: No profile available for this user

Code 2018218 comes back from the User Profile API when there is simply no profile to return. Meta's error-codes table explains the main case: "Currently, the User Profile API does not support retrieving profile information for Messenger accounts that were created using a phone number." Messenger allows people to sign up without a Facebook account, phone-number-only accounts, and those users have no Graph profile object your app can read, even though they can chat with your Page perfectly well.

That last part is the important nuance: this error says nothing about messaging. The PSID is valid, sends succeed, webhooks arrive; only the profile enrichment call fails. A bot that treats a profile-fetch failure as "user is broken" and halts the conversation degrades service for a class of users who are entirely reachable. The correct posture is graceful degradation, greet without a name, skip locale-based personalization, continue normally.

Distinguish it from its neighbors: 2018247 means your app lacks permission for requested fields (fix your request or review status), while 2018218 means no amount of permission would help, the data does not exist for this account type. And a PSID that fails with 100/2018001 is a different problem again: an ID that resolves to no one at all.

{
  "error": {
    "message": "(#2018218) No profile available for this user.",
    "type": "OAuthException",
    "code": 2018218,
    "fbtrace_id": "BLBz/WZt8dN"
  }
}

Write the bot's copy so names are decoration, not structure: "Hi there" must read as well as "Hi Maria." Wrap profile access in one helper with the fallback built in, and count 2018218 separately in metrics so it never pollutes error alerting. The profile API's field tiers and availability caveats are noted in the Messenger limits reference, with the enrichment-failure pattern in the troubleshooting guide.