Telegram error 409: Conflict: can't use getUpdates method while webhook is active

A webhook is registered for this token, and your code is trying to poll with getUpdates. The Bot API documents the two delivery modes as mutually exclusive: while a webhook URL is set, every getUpdates call returns this 409, and the description tells you the remedy in the same sentence. Updates are being delivered to the webhook URL instead, or piling up there if that URL is dead.

This is the single most common cause of 'my bot runs but never receives anything' for bots that were once deployed with webhooks, or whose framework registered a webhook automatically, and are now being run locally with polling. Many libraries swallow the 409 and retry forever, so the process looks healthy in logs while receiving nothing.

Libraries surface it the same way as the other 409: python-telegram-bot raises telegram.error.Conflict, aiogram raises TelegramConflictError, Telegraf rejects with a TelegramError carrying this description, and node-telegram-bot-api emits a polling_error with code ETELEGRAM. Read the description text to tell the two apart: this one names the webhook, the other names a competing getUpdates request.

The repair is a two-call dance. First inspect, then delete:

curl "https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/getWebhookInfo"
# {"ok":true,"result":{"url":"https://old-host.example/webhook","pending_update_count":218,...}}

curl "https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/deleteWebhook?drop_pending_updates=true"
# {"ok":true,"result":true,"description":"Webhook was deleted"}

drop_pending_updates=true discards the backlog (up to 24 hours of updates are retained); omit it if you want the queued updates replayed into your poller.

{"ok":false,"error_code":409,"description":"Conflict: can't use getUpdates method while webhook is active; use deleteWebhook to delete the webhook first"}

Decide per environment: webhooks in production, polling in development, and different tokens for each. Have your polling entrypoint call deleteWebhook on startup and your webhook entrypoint call setWebhook on startup, so the mode is always explicit rather than inherited from the last deploy. Check getWebhookInfo as the first diagnostic whenever a bot goes quiet; that habit is step 1 of the checklist in Telegram bot not responding, and the webhook-side failure modes are covered in the webhook debugging guide. Port and scheme rules for the webhook you register are listed under webhook limits.