Recently, Cuba has come down hard on social media and messaging services, too. Other countries that have hit WhatsApp with the ban include United Arab Emirates and North Korea, and in the past it has been outlawed in Brazil at times. The ruling party have cracked down on WhatsApp for years now and, if you travel there, you won’t be able to use the service (though there are anecdotal reports that suggest it may occasionally work, intermittently). The inability to use WhatsApp in China is probably the most renowned example. So, if you try to use the service in those nations, you’ll obviously be out of luck. That might be because the regime in power fears an encrypted messaging service (which it cannot breach) that interferes with its surveillance powers, or maybe due to WhatsApp messing with income from state telecoms outfits. Some countries have banned WhatsApp entirely. Offices, schools and colleges may block WhatsApp - and, indeed, other social media, messaging or video apps - due to the potential for it to be a time sink and generally impact negatively on employee or student productivity. However, there are two main scenarios when you may need a little assistance to use your go-to messaging app:

WhatsApp is not usually a service that you would need to unblock, or require a VPN to access under normal circumstances.

Related: How to make your WhatsApp images and videos disappear.

Here we’ll give you a simple step-by-step guide to how that process works. Whether that's because you're in a country that has enforced a WhatsApp ban altogether, or you attend a workplace, school or college that does likewise, you face being left WhatsApp-less.īut not if you’re running one of the best VPNs, which can allow you to sneak around any such bans. While there may be a ridiculous amount of people out there happily using WhatsApp, there are some who can’t do so - either permanently or temporarily.

And if you've landed on this guide, you're likely among the app's two billion users. WhatsApp is a seriously popular messaging service owned by Facebook, with Zuckerberg’s social media giant buying it back in 2014 for nearly $20 billion.

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