X came back online in Brazil earlier this week, three weeks after Elon Musk's platform was blocked by order of the Brazilian Supreme Court, which then fined the company approximately $1 million for each day the platform remained accessible in the country.
But Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told TechCrunch that X coming back online in Brazil this week was all a “coincidence.”
“I don't think this change was intentional to overcome the Brazilian block,” Prince told TechCrunch in an interview. “This is literally [X] “Switching from one IT vendor to another”
A few months ago, Cloudflare won a contract to provide cloud computing services to X around the world, including Brazil, Prince said. X had previously used Cloudflare competitor Fastly, but the social media platform is in the process of switching over. The change of provider also changed the IP addresses associated with X, confusing how Brazilian internet service providers could block the X platform.
“we [X] “As far as helping them get around the dam in Brazil,” Prince said, “they shifted a lot of their traffic from Fastly to us last week, especially in the Latin America region.”
Prince said it was pure chance, that his sales team won the contract and then, a few months later, “unintentionally got caught up in Elon Musk's geopolitical madness.” Some may find this hard to believe, given that Elon Musk has already taken multiple steps to circumvent Brazil's X ban. Earlier this month, Musk tried to deliver X directly to Brazilians via Starlink satellites, but later backed out.
In a statement posted to its Global Government Affairs account, an X spokesperson said the platform changed network providers X weeks ago when Brazil was shut down, disrupting infrastructure across the rest of Latin America. So is the timing of all this really a coincidence? We'll let you decide.
However, according to The New York Times, Brazilian regulators said Cloudflare was very cooperative in reblocking X.
Brazil implemented the block by requesting ISPs to block traffic to certain IP addresses, so the block was ineffective when X switched from Fastly to Cloudflare. But Prince claims his company was unaware of this and even says he doesn't believe X was actively trying to circumvent Brazil's ban. He further blames Brazil for employing a poor strategy to block X.
“They chose to implement it in a way that was kind of clumsy and very brittle,” Prince said. “It assumes that the IP addresses of X, or Twitter, or whatever you want to call it, will always be there. It changed because they switched to Cloudflare, but if X was trying to play a game here, they could have easily switched their IP addresses without switching to Cloudflare.”