A month after imposing a censorship on Twitter, the ultra conservative gulf kingdom Saudi Arabia has threatened to ban instant messaging applications like Skype and WhatsApp citing failure to control them as the reason.
"The Communications and Information Technology Commission has requested companies operating the applications to meet the regulatory requirements to avoid their suspension in the kingdom," sources told Saudi news website Sabq.
"The commission is now coordinating with the application operators on the issue."
According to Russia Today, the Saudi Arabian government had given just a week's time to the companies to deal with the situation and decide on technical measures.
The sources said the decision of banning instant messaging applications was "in accordance with regulatory procedures."
Saudi-owned television news channel Al Arabiya reported that instant messaging applications like Skype, WhatsApp and Viber face the risk of being banned.
Recently, Saudi Arabia Minister for Media and Culture Abdel Aziz Khoga had asked citizens to abide by the government's decision of banning Twitter.
"People have to take care of what they are writing on Twitter," the minister said.
"It's getting harder to observe around three million people subscribing to the social network in the kingdom."
Earlier, the government had banned the usage of Blackberry Phones stating that the sending and receiving of message was encrypting communications and was causing difficulty in monitoring them which in turn affected the country's efforts to fight terrorism and crime.
Here are some countries that have completely banned social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube:
