Brazil is the first country on the planet that blocked the application for an indefinite period WhatsApp Messenger, the decision coming just a few weeks after a local judge blocked $6 million from Facebook accounts because the company's representatives refused to cooperate with the authorities in a criminal investigation.
Judge Daniela Barbosa Assunção de Souza from Rio de Janeiro made this decision after Facebook refused to cooperate in a new criminal investigation, the company justifying its decision by the fact that it cannot access users' data from WhatsApp Messenger because they are already encrypted by upon submission.
Today's decision affects no less than 100 million people in Brazil, this being the number of active users locally, representing 10% of the total monthly active users of WhatsApp Messenger, so we are talking about a very hard blow for the Facebook company.
The interesting part is that the Attorney General of Brazil has stated that the judges are misinterpreting a provision of a law from 2014 and giving these decisions incorrectly, but this has not stopped others from imposing temporary suspensions of WhatsApp Messenger, or the blocking of certain amounts of money from Facebook accounts.
A Brazilian judge ordered an indefinite suspension of Facebook Inc's WhatsApp on Tuesday after it failed to cooperate in a criminal investigation. As we've said in the past, we cannot share information we don't have access to. We hope to see this block lifted as soon as possible.
Brazil is the first country on the planet to block WhatsApp Messenger for an indefinite period of time, the service being temporarily blocked in other countries for various reasons, but this is the toughest sanction imposed against WhatsApp, Facebook and the 100 million people who I use the messaging application every day.
Considering that we are talking about a decision given in the first instance, the representatives of WhatsApp Messenger will definitely try to cancel it through a call that will most likely be made in the next period, but in the meantime the application remains blocked for Brazilians.
