Tell HN: My wife was banned from WhatsApp without reason or recourse
Like many people, my wife and I use WhatsApp to keep in touch with various family and friends who prefer that platform.  I actually use it more than she does—she basically just chats with close family and a few friends from highschool.<p>A few days ago, she opened the app to find the message,<p>&gt; This account is not allowed to use WhatsApp
&gt; Chats are still on this device.<p>This didn&#x27;t make any sense, as she only uses it to chat with family and friends and certainly hadn&#x27;t broken any terms.  Found the option to appeal and submitted that.  A day later, the app now says<p>&gt; This account cannot use WhatsApp
&gt; We&#x27;ve completed our review and found this account&#x27;s activity goes against WhatsApp&#x27;s terms of service<p>There&#x27;s no way she&#x27;s actually broken any terms, so it appears this is some kind of mistake, but given the speed of the &quot;review&quot;, I doubt any human has actually looked at it.  She&#x27;s tried contacting them via their contact page, but given the review is already &quot;complete&quot;, I&#x27;m not too hopeful.<p>Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam.  Perhaps somehow all numbers in that group ended up associated with the spamming?  Regardless, pretty frustrating situation since she has a couple of long-running chats with family and friend groups that she can no longer participate in.  Always fun to be at the whims of the algorithm.<p>Posting in case there&#x27;s anything to the connection between marking a message as spam and getting blocked (maybe it&#x27;s safer to just mute spam messages instead), as well as on the off chance someone from Facebook ends up reading this and can help.