Telegram is blocked in Brazil for not checking your email

Telegram has gradually become one of the most important instant messaging applications on the planet. It may never have the popularity of WhatsApp, but it has definitely grown a lot in recent years.

Even so, this has not prevented the platform from being the victim of strange incidents where its availability in some territories is put at risk.

However, what has just happened to the application in the country of Brazil qualifies as one of the most absurd oversights in recent memory.

Basically, the messaging app was banned for not deigning to read your email inbox.

What happened to Telegram in Brazil

Broadly speaking, the judge of the Supreme Court of Brazil, Alexandre de Moraes, has ordered the suspension of Telegram because it did not respond to communications from the courts and authorities of that country.

Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov quickly and publicly apologized. Stating that his company had missed the court messages as they had been checking a different email address than the one used by law enforcement to try to contact them.

Perhaps not much is known outside of that nation, but Telegram could well be said to be the favourite platform of President Jair Bolsonaro and his followers. Therefore, it has always been considered for any regulatory issue along with other more popular networks such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter.

However, during the most recent efforts to control the spread of fake news, the rise of bots, sock puppets and other accounts of radical right-wing political commentators, Telegram had not even deigned to respond to petitions from the Brazilian government.

For this reason, the application was banned and disabled in the country, leaving the connection to VPN networks as the only way to use it.

Meanwhile, Judge Moraes has given Apple and Google five days to remove the app from their app stores. At the same time, the operators that offer the connection service to citizens have the same number of days to completely block access to Telegram.

The app is already working on suspending this exile movement. But everything would have been fixed and it wouldn’t have had to come to this point if they had checked their email.