Brazil court orders immediate restoration of lottery and public-service links after Sitelbra-Oi shutdown hits 18 states

A unilateral service cut by Sitelbra, in a dispute tied to Oi’s judicial recovery, knocked offline thousands of lottery outlets and several public-service systems across Brazil. For PSPs and high-risk operators, the useful bit is not the courtroom drama; it is how quickly a telecom dispute can stop cash collection, bill payments, and government-linked processing.

1. Since Saturday night, 1/8, thousands of lotéricas across Brazil were left without system access. The outlets could not process social benefit payments, utility bills, or tax collections, and queues formed outside closed branches.
2. According to the judicial decision by Judge Simone Gastesi Chevrand, the shutdown affected 70 Caixa Econômica Federal lottery units in 18 states, 1,066 Oi client data links across 26 federative units, 294 circuits used for the Bahia Public Security Secretariat’s video monitoring system project “Vídeo Polícia,” and 36 Enel Energia circuits in Ceará, causing total unavailability in 34 municipalities in the state. Government of Goiás service was also affected.
3. Sitelbra, a Brazilian company specializing in high-speed connectivity, IP transit, and data center infrastructure, had contracts with Grupo Oi to provide the network layer supporting these public services. On the night of Saturday, 1/8, it stopped those services unilaterally, without prior notice and without judicial authorization.
4. In the early hours of Monday, 3/8, the 7th Business Court of Rio de Janeiro ordered the immediate restoration of services. The case sits inside Oi’s long-running judicial recovery process, where Sitelbra is listed as an extraconcursal creditor; in this context, the court noted that a second-instance decision had suspended the enforceability of those claims, even though Oi said it had been making partial monthly payments through the court-appointed administrator.
5. BNLData reported that around 2,000 lottery outlets were without signal from Saturday onward. Caixa contacted the judge as soon as the cut was identified, which is the part operators should care about: when a network dependency sits under payments, a telecom dispute can become an acquiring and cash-collection outage in one move.