You click a WeTransfer link and get told the transfer has expired. Or you are the one sending, and the upload has sat at 99% for twenty minutes. Or WeTransfer says you have reached your limit when you feel you have barely used it.
These are the problems people actually hit, and very few of them are outages. Most are the free plan's rules, or something on your own computer or network, behaving exactly as designed. Below is each symptom in roughly the order people run into it, what is really going on, and what to do. The numbers come from WeTransfer's own help centre, because the free plan's rules have moved over the last two years (an account has been required to send since November 2024, for one) and a lot of older advice online no longer matches.
The free plan, as WeTransfer describes it now
At the time of writing, WeTransfer's Plan limits page and its article on transfer availability say the following about a free account. Nearly every symptom further down traces back to one of these lines.
- Transfers: up to 10, and up to 3 GB in total, in any rolling 30-day window. The 3 GB is the allowance for the whole window, not a per-file ceiling.
- Availability: a free transfer stays online for up to 3 days, counted from the exact moment it was sent.
- Recovery: expired Free and Starter transfers cannot be brought back. Recovery is for Ultimate, Teams and Enterprise only.
- Recipients: up to 10 email addresses per email transfer.
- An account: required to send since November 2024. If you are not logged in, WeTransfer emails you a verification code, and verifying it creates a free account.
- Email sends: a separate soft limit of 40 email transfers per 24 hours, to curb spam.
Transfer expired, or the download link no longer works
This is the most common one, and it is usually not a fault. A free transfer is available for up to 3 days from the moment it was sent, not from the moment you opened the email. If the email sat unread over a long weekend, the link can be dead by the time you click it.
Once a free transfer has expired, nobody can revive it. The fix is for the sender to upload the files again and send a fresh link. If the sender is on Ultimate and turned on recovery when creating the transfer, it may show as recoverable, and they can bring it back from their account.
Rule out one look-alike first: a link that is incomplete rather than expired. WeTransfer notes this happens when people copy the link out of the browser's download manager. Go back to the original notification email and use the link there.
- Recipient: open the link from the original email, not a copied one, and check what day it was sent.
- Sender on the free plan: upload again, send a new transfer, and tell the person it lasts up to 3 days.
- Sender who changes the expiry date from their account: the recipient's email still shows the original date, so tell them it has changed.
You've reached your transfer limit
This one confuses people because the count is not a calendar month. WeTransfer counts what you have sent in the last 30 days, on a rolling basis. Its own example: two transfers sent on the 1st free up two slots on the 1st of the following month, and eight sent on the 15th free up eight slots on the 15th. There is no single reset day when everything comes back at once.
The second surprise is the 3 GB. It is the total for the 30-day window, not the size of one transfer. A single 2.5 GB video uses most of the allowance on its own, even though you have only sent one transfer.
To see where you stand, hover over your account email in the top-right corner of WeTransfer, or look at the 'Sent' section of the 'Transfers' tab.
If you have sent a lot of email transfers today, you may instead have hit the soft limit of 40 email transfers per 24 hours. Email sending pauses, but link transfers keep working, so switch to a link transfer (the three-dot menu at the bottom left of the transfer panel) and paste the link into your own email or chat. That limit resets within 24 hours of your last emailed transfer.
If you are at the 30-day cap, you can wait for older transfers to age out, send this one another way (see the last section), or move to a paid plan. WeTransfer's Starter plan keeps the 10-transfer count but raises the data to 300 GB; Ultimate removes the transfer count and allows up to 1 TB per transfer. WeTransfer also says upload and download speeds are the same on free and paid accounts, so upgrading will not make a slow transfer faster.
Upload stuck at 0% or 99%
WeTransfer splits an upload into small chunks and sends them one after another. If a chunk does not arrive, the upload stalls, or fails with 'Hmm, something went wrong' right after you click Transfer. The cause is almost always local: the browser, the network, or the file itself.
Start with the browser. WeTransfer lists a known Safari issue where uploads can hang anywhere between 0% and 99%, and its workaround is to use Chrome or Firefox. If you are on a Mac and stuck at 99%, try that before anything else. Then work down this list:
- Stop the computer or phone from sleeping. Sleep mode cancels an upload. Keep it plugged in too, because low battery can trigger power saving.
- Copy the files to your local drive first. Files on an external drive, a USB stick or a synced cloud folder such as iCloud or Google Drive are a common cause of stalls.
- Close the file in any other app, and do not rename, move or edit it after selecting it. Finish exporting videos before you pick them.
- Zip a large batch of files into one archive. Make sure no two files share a name, and keep filenames under 255 characters.
- Restart the computer and the router. WeTransfer says this resolves the majority of mid-upload stalls.
- Try a phone hotspot. If the upload works there, your usual network is the problem: often a work network, a firewall or a VPN.
- Turn off ad or script blockers one at a time, then antivirus, firewall and VPN one at a time, to find the one interfering.
- If you only just saw 'Hmm, something went wrong', simply send it again. WeTransfer says a retry often works.
The recipient never got the email, or you never got the code
Since November 2024 you need a WeTransfer account to send. If you are not logged in, WeTransfer emails you a verification code before the transfer goes out. When that code does not arrive, WeTransfer says the most common reason is that your mail server is rejecting its emails or treating them as spam. Check your spam folder and add noreply@wetransfer.com to your trusted contacts.
When it is the recipient who cannot find the transfer email, check these in order:
- The address: a typo, a missing character, or a stray space at the start or end.
- Their spam or junk folder.
- A blocked or unsubscribed address: if they ever unsubscribed from or blocked WeTransfer emails, they can turn delivery back on at wetransfer.com/fix-emails.
- Skip the email entirely: copy the download link from your own upload confirmation email and send it to them yourself, or send the files again as a link transfer.
The download won't start, fails partway, or the zip won't open
A WeTransfer download runs in your browser, so its progress shows in the browser's own downloads list, not on the WeTransfer page. Plenty of 'nothing is happening' moments are a download that is in fact running. Check the downloads list before clicking again.
If it really is failing:
- Keep the browser open and the device awake until it finishes.
- Make sure there is enough free storage for the whole transfer.
- Do not use an external download manager such as Internet Download Manager or Folx. WeTransfer does not support them.
- Clear cookies and cache, update the browser, or try another browser or a private window.
- On a work network, ask IT whether WeTransfer is blocked. At home, restart the router.
- On a phone, update the WeTransfer app, check storage, and switch between Wi-Fi and mobile data.
- If the zip will not open: several files always arrive as one zip, and WeTransfer notes that zips larger than 4 GB can be difficult for the built-in tools on Windows and Mac. Open it with 7-Zip version 20.00 or newer on Windows, or The Unarchiver on Mac. On an Android phone that cannot open it, WeTransfer suggests WinZip from the Play Store.
When you just need the file there today
If the link has expired, you are out of allowance, or the upload refuses to finish, the quickest route is often to stop fighting WeTransfer and use something else for this one file. Whichever you pick, tell the person how long the link will last: with any file-sharing service, a lot of 'the link doesn't work' messages turn out to be a link that has simply expired.
Pick by size and by what you already use:
- Small files: plain email. A personal Gmail account can attach up to 25 MB, and Gmail turns anything bigger into a Google Drive link for you. Outlook.com caps the whole email, text included, at 25 MB.
- Google Drive: upload the file, click 'Share', change 'General access' to 'Anyone with the link', then click 'Copy link' and send it.
- Outlook and OneDrive: attach the file as a OneDrive link instead of a copy. OneDrive links do not count towards the email size limit, and Microsoft puts the linked file limit at 2 GB.
- OneSol Send (onesol.io/send): upload up to 5 GB and get one link. The link and files are deleted after 24 hours. The person receiving needs no account; you need a free OneSol account to send.