Brazilian judgeDaniela Barbosa Assunção de Souza ordered five Brazilian carriers to suspendFacebook Inc.-ownedWhatsApp Inc.indefinitely for refusing to cooperate in a criminal investigation, Reutersreported July 19.

The suspension will reportedly be lifted when the required datais surrendered for a case, the details of which were not revealed.

A WhatsApp representative said that the company cannot handover the encrypted messages because they are not stored on its servers, andadded that they hope to see the block lifted as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, the country's attorney general's officereportedly claimed that the suspension of WhatsApp comes from amisinterpretation of a 2014 law which is supposed to give a legal framework forthe Internet.