Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s popular instant messaging mobile application WhatsApp, has been banned in Brazil, once again. The popular mobile chat application is used by an estimated 100 million users in the country. This has allowed another popular chat application in the region, Telegram, to gain popularity at an exponential rate. Telegram has reported that an estimated 1 million users from Brazil have signed up for the application, which has caused their signup systems to crash.

The ban has been imposed by a Brazilian court, on May 2 and is expected to remain in effect for 3 days. The decision was passed after WhatsApp decided to decline the request from authorities to provide data for a criminal investigation. Unfortunately, the data cannot be retrieved by WhatsApp, even if it was legally compelled to do so. This is due to the new end-to-end encryption feature, which the company put into effect for all of its 1 billion users.

The irony of the situation is that Telegram has an even higher level of privacy set for its application, providing users with the option of secret messages, which delete themselves after some time. A copy of these messages is not kept on Telegram servers. This is the second time that Telegram has benefited from a ban on WhatsApp. The last time the application was banned in December 2015, Telegram reported the signing of 6 million new users from the country. Currently, Telegram has a meager 100 million users, compared to 1 billion WhatsApp users, globally.

Jan Koum, the co-founder of WhatsApp and its current CEO, stated that millions of innocent Brazilians are being punished for WhatsApp not turning over information that it doesn’t have. Mr. Koum also reaffirmed that he would continue to hold his stance on keeping data on the messenger encrypted. The judge had also ordered the company to comply or face a fine of $143,000 per day.

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) traded until 4:55 AM, May 4, on the NASDAQ, losing 0.96% of its share value, to close at a share price of $117.43, after having a trade volume of 1,117.