WhatsApp was blocked for 100 million Brazilians – Now its back!

Now a second judge has ordered the suspension be lifted, saying the service would be re-instated immediately.

WhatsApp is reportedly the most popular app in Brazil, with around 100 million users in the country.

If you’re in Brazil, you may have been upset that WhatsApp was blocked.

In a statement on this week’s decision, Sao Paulo’s criminal court system said only that WhatsApp had been handed two prior judicial orders this year that the California-based company failed to heed. The latter can be refuted by the fact that blocking a single service would not stop people from using online messaging.

Brazilians had complained in regards to the suspension of WhatsApp, which can be a massively popular program used by many to talk to buddies, family as well as co-workers both inside of Brazil and overseas on social media. Telegram Messenger, a competing app that includes text and voice messages, said on its Twitter account that some of its SMS gateways crashed after 1.5 million new users joined the service.

Individually in the court case, Brazilian phone companies have encouraged the authorities to control the usage of complimentary voice over-internet services. For that reason, the public prosecutor’s office requested the app be blocked, the statement said.

The name of the petitioner seeking the injunction before the criminal court as well as other details of the case are being kept secret by the judge, as is allowed under Brazilian law.

However, the union representing Brazil’s cell phone service operators, SindiTelebrazil, denied in a statement the companies were the plaintiffs in the case. They believe that services offered by then such as free calls (VoIP) often underestimates the services offered by them.

In a post early Thursday morning, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed frustration with the decision a few hours after WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum did the same.

“I am stunned that our efforts to protect people’s data would result in such an extreme decision”, he said.