China has Completely Blocked WhatsApp Service in the Country

If you been in touch with your family in China using WhatsApp, it’s time to seek for other services, specifically WeChat. In a report by  New York Times , WhatsApp services have been blocked in China after reports of some disturbance observed by Chinese censors. NYT Reports:

In mid-July, Chinese censors began blocking video chats and the sending of photographs and other files using WhatsApp, and they stopped many voice chats, as well. But most text messages on the app continued to go through normally. The restrictions on video, audio chats and file sharing were at least temporarily lifted after a few weeks.

WhatsApp now appears to have been broadly disrupted in China, even for text messages, Nadim Kobeissi, an applied cryptographer at Symbolic Software, a Paris-based research start-up, said on Monday. The blocking of WhatsApp text messages suggests that China’s censors may have developed specialized software to interfere with such messages, which rely on an encryption technology that is used by few services other than WhatsApp, he said.

If WhatsApp encryption has seriously been cracked, this is a huge blow to Facebook which has been trying hard to get the billion market, where the only popular messenger is WeChat which is of course highly scanned.

China is known to block apps, services, and even VPNs. The country is pretty strict to what goes around on social networks and keeps a tab from every perspective.  WeChat, the only service which works there is almost owned by China as it shares all the data with the Government.

The Verge, had a word with security researcher Nadim Kobeissi who explained:

“Essentially, it seems that what we initially monitored as censorship of WhatsApp’s photo, video and voice note sharing capabilities in July has now evolved to what appears to be consistent text messaging blocking and throttling across China.”