WhatsApp ban overturned by Brazilian court

As part of that case, WhatsApp has failed to comply with a judicial order issued July 23, the court said. “Brazilians have always been among the most passionate in sharing their voice online”, he added. Some 93 percent of Brazilians use WhatsApp, according to one estimate. Until today, Brazil has been an ally in creating an open Internet.

The interruption of WhatsApp’s text message and Internet telephone service caused outrage in Latin America’s largest country, where the company estimates it has 100 million personal users, and led to angry exchanges on the floor of Congress.

The shutdown was ordered by a Sao Paulo Judge Sandra Regina Nostre Marques, because it said the Facebook-owned application had allegedly withheld messages relating to a suspect in a drug trafficking investigation.

Social media companies such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter have huge amounts of users in Brazil.

Facebook did not answer repeated questions about why WhatsApp did not comply with the court order. “On 7 August, 2015, the company was notified again of being subject to fixed penalty in case of non-compliance”.

Many quickly migrated to WhatsApp’s competitors.

The name of the petitioner seeking the injunction before a criminal court in Sao Paulo state was kept secret by the judge, as is allowed under Brazilian law.

In a statement about the lower court’s order to block the service, Sao Paulo’s state court system said only that California-based WhatsApp had ignored two prior judicial orders this year.

“This is a sad day for Brazil”, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on his Facebook page”.

Technology companies often run into roadblocks in Brazil’s complicated legal system, where single judges have in the past tried to block Facebook, Google and other services for various reasons, such as failure to remove offensive posts or not handing over user information for investigations.

According to Zuckerberg, the case was related to protecting customers’ data. Civil liberties groups and the tech industry intensely opposed such a “data-localization” scheme, and it was dropped in favor of another, milder proposal that granted Brazilian courts jurisdiction over companies that provide digital services in Brazil.