WhatsApp Blocked in Brazil: Mark Zuckerberg Calls it a ‘Sad Day’

The company tweeted it had gained 500,000 users in Brazil in three hours after WhatsApp was blocked. “We’re disappointed that a judge would punish more than 100 million people across Brazil since we were unable to turn over information we didn’t have”, a WhatsApp spokesperson said.

“This is a sad day for Brazil”, Zuckerberg wrote.

Brazilian phone companies have been complaining loudly that customers are dropping their services in favor of using WhatsApp’s free call service.

The company was notified again on August 7th, and this time warned they would be fined for failure to comply.

For the past few months, Brazil’s telecom operators had been working on ways to prove to the government that the Facebook-owned messaging service wasn’t playing fair.

WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging service, has been ordered by a Brazilian judge to shut down for two days.

Folha newspaper said that as part of an investigation into an alleged gang member, the court tried to get access to his WhatsApp messages. The court claimed that WhatsApp had refused to cooperate in a criminal case.

The reason for the order was murky because it arose from criminal proceedings in Sao Paulo state that are being kept under judicial secret.

“This is a sad day for Brazil”, says Zuckerberg.

A Brazilian court has order a 48 hour Whatsapp shutdown which could see 93 million people temporarily stopped from using the service. WhatsApp is causing headaches for Brazil’s telecoms companies because it offers a free alternative to the country’s high cell phone rates, especially for youths and the poor.

Earlier, Brazilian media had reported that Judge Sandra Regina Nostre Marques applied the ban in relation to the app’s withholding of messages relating to a suspect in a drug trafficking investigation. SimilarWeb informed that before the blackout 2.35% of Android devices had Telegram while Facebook Messenger was installed on 74% of the devices.