WhatsApp blocked for 100 million users in Brazil for 72 hours by decision of a provincial judge

Judge Marcel Maia Montalvão from the tiny state of Sergipe in northeastern Brazil sent a court order to five main cellular operators to block the traffic of the WhatsApp messenger from May 2, 2016, 14:00 (20:00 Moscow time). For failure to comply with the order operators face a fine of $ 143 thousand per day.

This is the second time when the court blocks the work of the most popular messenger in Brazil with 100 million users. The same story happened on December 17, 2015, when WhatsApp was blocked for 48 hours by order of the judge of the city of São Paulo. As now, the decision was taken as a punishment for refusing to cooperate with the investigation. During the investigation of the criminal case against one of the local drug dealers, WhatsApp (Facebook) refused to give out private information about the user's conversations. By law, this is punishable by temporarily blocking the service in the country.

Last time, the authorities failed to contain the threat: another court overturned the blocking after about 12 hours , finding that "millions of users should not be victims of the company's reluctance to cooperate with the investigation."

The twelve hours of the "blockade" brought a lot of inconvenience to the people of Brazil, for whom WhatsApp is the main way of communication in the conditions of excessively expensive cellular communication. Mark Zuckerberg called that judgment "a sad day for Brazil."
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Obviously, the authorities have not learned a lesson since the last time, and now history repeats itself.

By the way, for December 17, 2015, the audience of the second most popular messenger in the country Telegram increased by 4 million people .

In the fight against drugs, Brazil is not limited to blocking Internet services. In March 2016, the federal police detained Facebook's vice president in Latin America for “repeated refusal to execute court orders in a drug trafficking case”, that is, to issue a correspondence of drug dealers through the WhatsApp service. He was taken to the police station under escort, interrogated and released. The warrant was issued by the same judge Marcel Maya Montalvao as now.