Brazil’s Supreme Court on Friday ordered the suspension of messaging app Telegram, arguing that it did not adhere to the judicial orders to block the accounts that were spreading misinformation.   

Justice Alexandre de Moraes said in his ruling on Friday that the company had ignored requests from Brazilian authorities to block profiles that were linked to blogger Allan dos Santos, an ally of President Jair Bolsonaro accused of spreading misinformation. 

The justice added that Telegram had also failed to name a legal representative in the country.

“The Telegram platform, at every possible opportunity, failed to heed judicial orders in a total disregard for the Brazilian judiciary,” de Moraes said in his ruling. 

The justice said in his ruling that “the complete and full suspension of the works of Telegram in Brazil will remain until the judicial decisions previously issued are carried out.”

A warrant was issued for dos Santos’ arrest in October last year. The activist, who is now a fugitive based in the United States, has, however, remained active on Telegram.

Following the order, one of the messaging app’s founders, Pavel Durov, said in a statement that Telegram “had an issue with emails going between our telegram.org corporate addresses and the Brazilian Supreme Court. As a result of this miscommunication, the Court ruled to ban Telegram for being unresponsive.”

“I apologize to the Brazilian Supreme Court for our negligence. We definitely could have done a better job. We complied with an earlier court decision in late February and responded with a suggestion to send future takedown requests to a dedicated email address. Unfortunately, our response must have been lost, because the Court used the old general-purpose email address in further attempts to reach us,” he added. 

Durov also asked the court to “consider delaying its ruling for a few days at its discretion to allow us to remedy the situation by appointing a representative in Brazil and setting up a framework to react to future pressing issues like this in an expedited manner.”

Telegram remained operational in the country as of Friday evening.