Procon-SP claims to have fined Facebook more than R$11 million because of the global WhatsApp blackout that took place in October this year. In Brazil, the messaging app was down for more than seven hours. The agency accuses the company of poor service provision.
The exact amount of the penalty applied is BRL 11,286,557.54. The company, which changed its name to Meta, still has the right to defend itself.
“There was a clear failure in the provision of the service, harming millions of consumers in Brazil and around the world. Although the service is not charged, the company profits from the users, so there is a consumption relationship”, says Fernando Capez, director of Procon-SP .
According to the agency, the blackout in October this year affected more than 91 thousand Brazilian consumers on Facebook, more than 90 thousand on Instagram and more than 156,000 on Whatsapp.
Procon-SP also claims to have identified abusive clauses in the terms of use of applications controlled by Meta, such as the one that provides for the possibility of unilateral alteration of the contract by the company.
The day after the blackout, the São Paulo agency even stated that only a “very strong event”, such as an earthquake, could exempt WhatsApp from responsibility for the damage caused.
At the time, the platform claimed that the failure was caused by an error that occurred during a change to its settings.
The problem would have occurred during a change in a structure that coordinates traffic between its data centers, which generated a ripple effect that interrupted communication and caused other centers to be affected, causing the blackout.
“The cause of this outage has also affected many of the tools and systems we use in our daily operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the issue,” the platform said.
The network also said there was no evidence of data leaks during the blackout, but did not disclose how many of the group’s more than 2.7 billion app users were affected.
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