WhatsApp offline for three days in Brazil after court ruling

A Brazilian judge has ruled that WhatsApp will be taken off the air for 72 hours. To do this, telephone companies have to block the service. The block is imposed because WhatsApp refuses to cooperate with a police investigation.

The decision was made on April 26 by Judge Marcel Montalvao of Sergipe, the country’s smallest state in the northeast. The blockade went into effect on Monday 2 May at 2 p.m. local time. The police are looking for information about drug-related matters that would have been distributed by criminals via WhatsApp.

Telephone companies must implement the blockade on pain of 500,000 Brazilian real a day, or about 124,000 euros, writes Folha de Sao Paulo. The telcos have indicated that they will cooperate with the request, but are now looking for ways to get the demand off the table.

Since WhatsApp encrypts its messages, WhatsApp is unlikely to be able to decrypt the messages for authorities. This means that the company probably cannot meet the requirement. WhatsApp is estimated to have more than 93 million users in Brazil.

In mid-December last year, a judge also imposed a blockade to force WhatsApp to release information. A few months later, on March 1, this year, the Brazilian police arrested the deputy director of the Latin American branch of Facebook and Instagram because WhatsApp also refused to release any information at the time. Because WhatsApp has no office in the country, the judge decided that the local vice president of Facebook should therefore be arrested.

WhatsApp competitor Telegram reports on Twitter that the issuance of verification codes via SMS has become overloaded.