Once again, Brazil decided to block Facebook's messaging service, WhatsApp for 72 hours. The app was shut down at 2 p.m., May 3, Tuesday, and is set to return on May 6, Friday. More than a hundred million people who use WhatsApp in the country are affected.
Judge Marcel Montalvao from Sergipe ordered telecom providers in Brazil to block WhatsApp in a dispute over data access, according to the Brazilian publication Folha De S. Paulo. He ordered the messaging service to turn over chat records associated with a drug investigation, which it cannot provide since it has no access to chats in unencrypted form.Phone firms that do not comply would be fined.
WhatsApp was also shut down in December when Facebook did not give what the Brazilian authorities demanded in ongoing criminal cases but the ban was lifted after 12 hours. It recently implemented end-to-end encryption to its users - meaning, no one, even the service providers themselves, cannot access user messages at any point.
In March, Montalvao ordered the arrest of Diego Dzodan, Facebook's vice president for Latin America. Facebook said its messaging service operates independently and Dzodan has no control over its data.
Facebook's messaging app is disappointed with Brazil's decision, considering it has exerted efforts to cooperate. A spokesperson from WhatsApp told Tech Crunch, "This decision punishes more than 100 million Brazilians who rely on our service to communicate, run their businesses, and more, in order to force us to turn over information we repeatedly said we don't have."
Brazil is currently having political crisis and shutting down its primary medium of communication is not trivial, a Brazil-based lawyer, Mariana Cunha e Melo told the tech website. Both the poor and the rich in the country use WhatsApp, she said.
After the shutdown, other messaging apps in Brazil like Telegram and iMessage trended on Twitter in the country. Telegram provides users some encryption, but can access user communications if asked by the court, while iMessage provides end-to-end encryption.
Many WhatsApp users in Brazil have several groups of friends or business partners they regularly communicate with. Hence, they cannot easily migrate to other messaging apps.
The video below reports Brazil's decision to shut down WhatsApp.