Chinese government has a long and not very warm relationship with WhatsApp. The application has been hindered multiple times in the land of dragons and gunpowder: its voice chat, as well as video chat, was blocked, you could not send pictures et cetera. Now the Chinese have made a logical step forward and pretty much blocked the application from usage. They did it by blocking the possibility of sending text messages by the app, basically rendering it useless. You still can made video and audio calls with it, but you can just use your phone to do that, so meh. The way the Chinese government achieved this is, or so I heard, by blocking the NoiseSocket protocol, the one that the app uses to send text messages.

This is a very strong and probably final blow that the Chinese governemnt delivered against Mark Zuckerberg. WhatsApp was the last large outpost that Facebook’s creator had in China. With it now practically gone, Facebook has lost its only major holding there left.

Too bad?