Afghanistan Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (ATRA) has ordered telecom companies to block Telegram and WhatsApp applications, reasoning security concerns.

According to two official letters went viral, ATRA asked telecom companies to shut the applications for 20 days starting 01 Nov.

In addition, it instructs the companies to block a number of Facebook and Twitter accounts as well.

The granddaddy that helped pioneer the early market, Signal appeared in 2014 as the unification of two earlier open source apps with rather complicated histories, TextSecure and RedPhone, authored by famous developer Moxie Marlinspike. Today, the underlying end-to-end Signal protocol (previously called ‘Axolotl’) is now used by several other apps mentioned here including, in 2016, WhatsApp itself. Its security and privacy features are second to none. To many, Signal is the original and best on which many others are based - even Edward Snowden uses it.