He also noted that “we are working hard to get this block reversed”.
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The shutdown in Brazil, Latin America’s largest country, comes as Brazilian telecommunications companies have sought to curtail the meteoric growth of WhatsApp, which is used by people around the world to send texts without paying carrier fees.
A judge in Sao Bernardo do Campo – an industrial suburb of Sao Paulo – issued the order for the suspension of WhatsApp’s services.
The ban which was effective from midnight Wednesday, snarling communications for many of its 100 million users in Brazil for about 12 hours.
Phone companies shut down the free messaging service after they failed to respond to court orders in a criminal investigation, causing many users to look for alternatives such as Viber and Telegram.
If you’re in Brazil, you’ll have to do without WhatsApp for a few days. Most of the details regarding the case has been kept in hiding by the judge, which is allowed by a Brazilian court.
Brazilians had joined in black humor and outrage and tech giants expressed worry over the state’s heavy hand Thursday after a judge banned the service for 48 hours.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of parent company Facebook, echoed those sentiments in a post to the social media site.
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Zuckerberg said that he was “stunned that our efforts to protect people’s data would result in such an extreme decision by a single judge to punish every person in Brazil who uses WhatsApp”. A survey conducted by the research company Ibope found that 93 percent used WhatsApp while 79 percent used Facebook regularly. Rival messaging app Telegram reported that it received 1 million downloads in Brazil in one day because of the WhatsApp ban.
