Brazil court orders lifting of suspension of WhatsApp services

A Brazilian court  on Thursday ordered the lifting of a 48-hour suspension on the services of phone-messaging application WhatsApp in the country, overturning an order from a lower court.

Brazilian phone companies shut down WhatsApp's text message and Internet telephone service in Latin America's largest market following the court order, outraging users of the app, which is said to have over 100 million personal users in Brazil.

The reason for the suspension order was murky because it arose from criminal proceedings in Sao Paulo state that are kept under judicial secret.

However, Mark Zuckerberg, who heads WhatsApp's parent company Facebook, said in a Facebook post that the case was related to the company's attempt to guard customers' data.

"I am 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," Zuckerberg wrote in his Facebook post.

"Until today, Brazil has been an ally in creating an open Internet," he added. "Brazilians have always been among the most passionate in sharing their voice online."

In a statement, Sao Paulo's state court system said only that California-based WhatsApp had ignored two prior judicial orders this year.

"Because even then the company did not heed the judicial decision, the public prosecutors' office requested the service be blocked," the court's statement read. 

Brazil's biggest telecoms put up scant fight against the judicial order. For months they have complained about WhatsApp, saying that they lose revenue because clients use its free services instead of using the phone companies' own text messaging.

But the association representing the cellphone industry, SindiTelebrazil, denied in a statement those companies were the plaintiffs in the case.

Brazilians are among the globe's most voracious users of social media such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter.

Many were quickly migrating to WhatsApp's competitors. Viber, another social messaging company, said usage in the Brazilian market had grown by 2,000 percent in 12 hours, while the messaging service Telegram said over 1.5 million new Brazilian clients started using it Thursday.

Technology companies often run into roadblocks in Brazil's complicated legal system, where single judges have in the past tried to block Facebook, Google and other services for various reasons, such as failure to remove offensive posts or not handing over user information for investigations. 

Wire services