A Brazilian judge struck down an earlier court ruling to suspend messaging service WhatsApp in Latin America's biggest country for 72 hours, reactivating it on Tuesday, the day after it was shut down.
The ruling by Judge Ricardo Mucio Santana de Abreu Lima came just hours after another judge upheld an earlier judicial order suspending WhatsApp's services. The application was working again by Tuesday afternoon.
The suspension had gone into effect Monday shortly after it was ordered by Judge Marcel Maia Montalvao, in the northeastern state of Sergipe.
A court official in Sergipe said the suspension was ordered because WhatsApp has repeatedly failed to turn over information about its users for an investigation into drug trafficking and organized crime.
WhatsApp officials have estimated that the service is used by 100 million Brazilians.
"Yet again millions of innocent Brazilians are being punished because a court wants WhatsApp to turn over information we repeatedly said we don't have," the messaging service's CEO and co-founder Jan Koum said on his Facebook page after Montalvao's ruling. "We encrypt messages end-to-end on WhatsApp to keep people's information safe and secure, we also don't keep your chat history on our servers."
"We have no intention of compromising the security of our billion users around the world," he added.
Montalvao's suspension was the latest chapter in a dispute between Brazilian law enforcement and Facebook, which bought WhatsApp in 2014.
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