X went back online in Brazil earlier this week, three weeks after Elon Musk’s platform was blocked under orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court. That prompted Brazil’s top court to fine X Corp. nearly $1 million for every day the platform remained accessible in the country.
However, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince tells TechCrunch that X going back online in Brazil this week was all a “coincidence.”
“I don’t think anything about this change was intentional to overcome a block in Brazil,” said Prince in an interview with TechCrunch. “This was literally just [X] switching from one IT vendor to another IT vendor.”
Some months ago, Prince said, Cloudflare won a deal to provide X with cloud computing services in several regions across the globe, including Brazil. X had previously used Fastly, a competitor to Cloudflare, and the social media platform is currently in the process of rolling out that switch. Changing providers also changed IP addresses associated with X, which disrupted how Brazilian internet service providers were blocking the X platform.
“We have never talked with [X] about helping them get around the Brazilian ban,” said Prince. “They happened to transition a bunch of their traffic from Fastly over to us, especially in the Latin American region, over the last week.”
Prince describes this as wild coincidence, where his sales team won a deal, and as a result ended up inadvertently “wading into some geopolitical Elon Musk vortex of craziness” months later. Some may find that a bit hard to believe, given that Elon Musk has tried multiple avenues already to skirt Brazil’s ban on X. Musk tried delivering X directly to Brazilians through his Starlink satellites earlier this month, but later backed down.
A spokesperson for X says the platform changed network providers when Brazil shut down X weeks ago, which disrupted its infrastructure throughout the rest of Latin America, in a statement posted on its Global Government Affairs account. So is the timing of all this truly a coincidence? You be the judge.
However, Brazilian regulators say Cloudflare has been extremely cooperative in helping to get X reblocked, according to The New York Times.
Brazil implemented its block by requiring ISPs to block traffic to certain IP addresses. When X switched from Fastly to Cloudflare, therefore, the block was no longer in effect. However, Prince claims his company did not know this was going to happen, and even says he doesn’t think X was actively trying to circumvent Brazil’s ban. He even knocked Brazil for using an insufficient strategy to block X.
“They chose to implement it in a way which is kind of kludgy, and very fragile,” said Prince. “That assumes that X, Twitter, or whatever we call it, will always be on that IP address… It changed because they switched to Cloudflare, but if X were trying to play games here, they could have switched their IP address very easily without switching to Cloudflare.”