X, the platform owned by Elon Musk, resumed operations in Brazil this week after being blocked for three weeks by Brazil’s Supreme Court. The blockage had incurred daily fines of nearly $1 million for X Corp. Despite the high stakes, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince insists this reappearance was purely coincidental.
Prince clarified the situation in a recent interview, explaining that X’s return to Brazil was not an attempt to bypass the ban. Instead, it was a side effect of X transitioning from its former IT vendor, Fastly, to Cloudflare. This switch inadvertently changed the IP addresses linked to X, which threw off the Brazilian regulators’ efforts to block the platform.
A few months ago, Cloudflare secured a deal to provide cloud computing services for X in various global regions, including Brazil. According to Prince, this transition, especially over the past week, shifted much of X’s traffic to Cloudflare, disrupting Brazil’s attempts to enforce the block. Prince firmly stated that there were no conversations about helping X evade the Brazilian ban. He referred to this incident as a bizarre coincidence, describing it as his team stumbling into a “geopolitical Elon Musk vortex of craziness.”
While it might seem too convenient to be a mere coincidence, Elon Musk has indeed been exploring various methods to bypass Brazil’s restrictions on X. Just earlier this month, he considered using Starlink satellites to deliver X’s service directly to Brazilian users but later abandoned the idea.
A spokesperson for X mentioned that the platform’s switch in network providers during Brazil’s shutdown led to infrastructure disruptions across Latin America. This shift inadvertently impacted the Brazilian internet service providers’ ability to block X.
On the regulatory front, Brazilian authorities have acknowledged Cloudflare’s cooperation in reinstating the block. Brazil’s strategy for blocking X involved mandating ISPs to restrict traffic to specific IP addresses. Hence, when X switched from Fastly to Cloudflare, the block became ineffective. Prince noted that had X truly intended to dodge the block, it could have easily done so without changing vendors, purely by altering its IP addresses.
Prince criticized Brazil’s method of blocking as being inherently flawed, seeing that it relied on static IP addresses. He implied that with how dynamic the internet infrastructure is, such a strategy is bound to fail when any significant changes occur.
