In a bid to protect the revenues of traditional telecom companies, Saudi Arabia has now blocked social networking giant Facebook’s Messenger service. Internet calling over WhatsApp and Viber were already blocked in Saudi Arabia but similar apps including Tango and Line are still available in the country. Also Read - WhatsApp announces rollout of end-to-end encrypted backups for Android, iOS
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Although the authorities claimed that the service has been blocked since it violated regulations, the independent reports. “The service had been banned because it failed to comply with regulations,” an official told local news services.
Facebook recently announced that it has hit a milestone of 800 million monthly active users for its Messenger app. Back in June 2015, the company had confirmed that its standalone messenger app had 700 million users, up from 600 million in late March.
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Facebook Messenger bots are something that are was officially announced at the Facebook’s F8 conference. Bots for Facebook Messenger help users to easily communicate with businesses. Mark Zuckerberg had announced that over 60 billion messages are sent daily by users on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which is nearly three times more compared to SMS.
With additional inputs
