I had a bot working quite well, where I set webHooks to send me updates. It has worked fine for me until today. I made some very small adjustment to my code but found that even though I send text to the bot it was not sending any updates. Thinking it was my code I spent a fair bit of time troubleshooting, when it dawned on me that somehow webHooks must be disengaged.
I sent an http request to the bot for updates and got a page full, meaning my assumption was correct, updates were not being sent via webhooks. I then sent a http request to the bot to set webhooks and they became set, at which time, all the messages were sent to my server.
So to assure that it was working I sent another text from the bot and got no reponse. Checking for updates through an http request, I saw that the update had not been sent by webhooks. Setting webhooks again, the message recently sent was then sent to my server.
So in resumen: I set webhooks, but when I want the bot to send me a message it comes out of webhooks mode until I set it again, at which point the "missing message" is actually sent!
I resolved this. Since my code isn't involved when a telegram message is sent to the bot, it is either saved for perusal with getupdates or retrieved by webhooks which I sent externally through http, I figured something had happened on the telegram side, so I revoked the bot key and created a new one! That did the trick.
Maybe someone got a hold of my bot key, really can't explain why it acted as it did, but now it's up and running! AND I've taken measures to hide the bot key better!