A judge in Sao Paulo has ordered WhatsApp to shut down for 48 hours, starting at 9PM Eastern tonight.
WhatsApp is the single most used app in Brazil, with about 93 million users, or 93% of the country's internet population. It's a particularly useful service for Brazil's youth and poor, many who cannot afford to pay the most expensive plans on the planet.
Brazilian telco's have been lobbying for months to convince the government that WhatsApp's voice service is unregulated and illegal (not entirely unlike the taxi industry's posture on Uber), and have publicly blamed the "WhatsApp effect" for driving millions of Brazilians to abandon their cell phone lines.
A WhatsApp shut-down would be akin to taking half the country off the electricity grid because of an industry squabble over the impending threat of solar power.
Update: Brazil court lifts suspension of Facebook's WhatsApp service
(Score: 5, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Thursday December 17 2015, @03:48PM
TFA doesn't really indicate why they might want to shut it down other than "they don't like it" or what it is. A quick search suggest this software is an instant messaging program that uses encryption in such a way as to make it impossible for third parties to snoop on or monitor the messages.
No wonder it needs to be "regulated".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday December 17 2015, @06:51PM
It also uses your data plan where ever possible, and abandons the telco sms layer.
Whatsapp is basicly a repackaging [wikipedia.org] of XMPP (jabber) to intentionally add some incompatibilities with the standard protocol including a non standard (and totally in-effective) encryption layer.
It is store and forward, with server retention of messages, and address book mining. And its owned by Facebook.
A perfect storm of "don't want".
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.