Facebook will give you 10 minutes to unsend that embarrassing message

You can finally take back your ill-conceived messages on Facebook.

Facebook Messenger will soon roll out an unsend feature, which will give users a grand total of ten minutes to unsend a message, wiping it from your chat history. This will remove the message from the recipient’s inbox as well. 

Facebook announced the upcoming feature in the “coming soon” section of its latest rundown detailing what’s new in the version of Facebook Messenger on the App Store. 

Facebook’s release notes read:

“Remove a message from a chat thread after it’s been sent. If you accidentally send the wrong photo, incorrect information or message the wrong thread, you can easily correct it by removing the message within ten minutes of sending it.”

Currently, while Facebook users can delete messages that they sent from their own inbox, the recipient of the message can still see them. At least, that’s how its worked for users whose name isn’t Mark Zuckerberg.

Earlier this year, reported that the company was deleting old Facebook messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg from its recipients inboxes. The users who had their mailboxes scrubbed of Zuckerberg’s texts weren’t even informed of the removal. Facebook apologized and that they would be rolling out an unsend feature to everyone in the coming months.

However, unlike it’s billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg’s messages which were many years old at the time of deletion, Facebook is only extending us Facebook-using peons the ability to retract and remove messages within a 10 minute timeframe.

Compared to Facebook other messaging application, , you’ll actually have significantly less time to delete a sent message in Facebook’s flagship Messenger app. WhatsApp users are currently afforded just over one hour to remove a message from both users’ inbox.

Google’s for Gmail allows users to choose how long they have to unsend an email. Gmail allows users the time intervals of 5, 10, 20, and 30 seconds to take back that drunk email you never should have sent in the first place. 

However, it should be noted that Facebook’s unsend feature for both Messenger and WhatsApp work differently from Gmail’s. Gmail actually holds the email in a que for the time interval chosen. It doesn’t actually send the email until it passes that buffer time. Facebook’s unsend for both its messaging apps will actually deliver the message when you hit send. This gives the recipient the opportunity to read the messages, even if you decide to take it back within the timeframe its eligible to be “unsent.”

While Facebook won’t allow us to have Zuckerberg’s god-level ability to scrub 8 year old messages, we’ll certainly take the ten minutes over the current option of fresh out of luck.