The suspension was ordered by Marcel Maia Montalvao, a judge in the small, remote northeastern state of Sergipe.
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Phone companies in Brazil will have to pay a hefty fine of 500,000 reais ($143,000) a day if they failed to cut off Whatsapp service.
WhatsApp says it does not store the encrypted data the court seeks.
WhatsApp has said that it is “disappointed” by the decision, which will apply to Brazil’s five main mobile operators, and that it has cooperated fully with the state court during the investigation. The 48-hour ban was rescinded 12 hours later, when another judge ruled it was “not reasonable that millions of users should be affected by the inertia of the company”.
Investigators first contacted WhatsApp several months earlier but hadn’t received a response, Horta said. The order, issued last week, was unsealed today when it became effective. It is a sad day for Brazil Mark Zuckerberg said the last time Brazil banned WhatsApp.
A judge in Brazil has once again ordered a temporary block on the popular messaging app WhatsApp in response to the company’s refusal to turn over data in a criminal investigation. The company refused to share the information saying that they can’t access the messages because of end-to-end encryption technology.
Brazilians, yesterday took to Twitter to lament the loss of WhatsApp, which was used there as much by professionals as by students. It has been estimated that over 100 million users were affected, presumably some of which are law enforcement which could have affected the decision to overturn the original ruling.
At the time, a spokeswoman for federal police in Sergipe, Monica Horta, said investigators had requested content from a WhatsApp messaging group as well as other data, including geolocation.
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The decision “punishes more than 100 million users who depend upon us to communicate themselves, run their business and more, just to force us hand over information that we don’t have”.
