The Government Commissioned Its Own WhatsApp, Spent More Than 600,000 Euros, and Almost Nobody Signed In
A secure messaging application restricted to ministers and public employees was built, barely used, and questioned on security grounds. Because it sat inside a PRR milestone, Portugal now has to explain to Brussels how it reinforced the government network without it.
Somewhere in the Portuguese state's IT accounts there is a line worth more than 600,000 euros for a messaging application built so that ministers and civil servants could talk to each other without using WhatsApp. It was delivered. Almost nobody used it. Público reported on Friday that the project has been abandoned, and that Portugal now has to explain the gap to the European Commission.
A secure chat app, commissioned by the state, for the state
The idea belonged to the previous government, under António Costa, and sat inside a broader objective of strengthening the state's communications and its information security. The specification was straightforward: an application resembling WhatsApp, restricted to members of the government and public employees, running on the government's own reinforced network rather than on a commercial platform outside the country.
The reasoning behind it is not eccentric. Ministries across Europe have spent the past decade discovering that policy is being made in group chats hosted by companies they do not control, with retention rules they cannot set and archiving obligations they cannot meet. Portugal's own intelligence service has issued repeated warnings about foreign campaigns targeting officials' WhatsApp and Signal accounts. Building something in-house was the orthodox answer.
Two failures, not one
According to Público, the application failed on two fronts at once. Take-up was very low, which is the ordinary fate of any internal tool that competes with an app already installed on every phone in the building. And doubts were raised about the security of a network of this kind, which is a more awkward finding, since security was the entire justification for the spending.
An unused secure channel is not merely a waste. It is worse than no channel at all, because the conversations it was built to capture simply carry on somewhere else, unlogged.
Why Brussels is now involved
The component was folded into the reinforcement of the government's IT network, which was itself a milestone financed under the Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (Recovery and Resilience Plan, PRR). That is what turns an embarrassing procurement into a live financial question.
Portugal must now explain, in the final PRR payment request, how it strengthened the government's network without the components it said it would deliver. Brussels may accept the explanation. It may also take the view that the investment was effectively reversed, in which case Portugal risks losing the funding tied to that milestone, or seeing money already received deducted or clawed back.
The timing is unhelpful. The plan's execution deadline falls on Monday, and the government spent August filing a final revision precisely to avoid handing money back. A milestone that cannot be evidenced is exactly the kind of item that surfaces late in a closing audit.
The wider record on state IT
Portugal's digital-state programme has produced genuine wins and some conspicuous stumbles. The NIS2 registration and incident-reporting rulebook came into force this year, tightening obligations on essential entities. In the same period a cyberattack froze customer channels at the state water group Águas de Portugal, and the SNS lost real-time records for 150,000 consultations in a June outage.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched public-sector technology anywhere: the rules arrive on time, the tools arrive late, and the humans keep using whatever is already on their phone.
What This Means for Foreign Residents
- Your dealings with the state are unaffected. This was an internal tool for officials, not a citizen-facing service. Nothing about the Portal das Finanças, Segurança Social Direta or the SNS app changes.
- It matters for the PRR arithmetic. If Brussels treats the milestone as unmet, the correction lands on the Portuguese budget, which is where every other public service is funded from.
- Assume officials use ordinary messaging apps. If you correspond with a public body, keep to official written channels with a reference number. Anything else may not exist in the file.
- Expect scrutiny in Parliament. A six-figure spend with no working product and a European funding consequence is the shape of question that gets tabled when the House returns.
