Banned X temporarily restored in Brazil after technical update

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Elon Musk’s social media platform X was temporarily restored in Brazil on Wednesday, with some users able to access the network despite a ban imposed by the country’s Supreme Court.

The app was partially accessible after the company switched its third-party cloud provider to Cloudflare, in what some Brazilian officials believed could be a technical maneuver to deliberately circumvent the ban in Latin America’s largest country.

This allowed some users to access X without using a virtual private network (VPN), which Brazil’s Supreme Court had banned for the purpose of viewing the social media platform.

A spokesperson for X said the company switched carriers after the infrastructure needed to provide services across Latin America became inaccessible to employees. This update resulted in “an unintended and temporary restoration of services for Brazilian users,” it said.

“While we expect the platform to be unavailable in Brazil soon, we continue to work with the Brazilian government to ensure its speedy return to the Brazilian population,” the spokesperson added.

X’s brief comeback highlights the technical difficulties that authorities can face when trying to block certain websites.

X was blocked in Brazil, where the service has over 20 million users, by a controversial Supreme Court order on August 31 after the service refused to appoint a legal representative in the country, despite being required to do so under national law.

It was a dramatic escalation between Musk and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes after the billionaire entrepreneur publicly criticized court demands to delete some accounts that appeared to be linked to far-right individuals and groups and were suspected of spreading misinformation. Musk also closed his company’s office in the country in protest against the orders.

Moraes led a sweeping crackdown on digital disinformation in the South American country. Supporters say it protected democracy, but Brazil’s right-wing opposition accuses the judge of censorship.

Abrint, the Brazilian association of internet and telecommunications providers, said the change of service provider from X to Cloudflare “makes blocking the application much more complicated.”

“Unlike the previous system, which used specific and blockable IPs, the new system uses dynamic IPs that are constantly changing. Many of these IPs are shared with other legitimate services such as banks and large internet platforms, making it impossible to block an IP without affecting other services,” Abrint said.

“Blocking Cloudflare would mean blocking not only X, but also a number of other services that rely on this infrastructure, which could have a negative impact on the entire Internet.”

Cloudflare and Brazil’s communications regulator declined to comment.

Additional reporting by Bryan Harris in Brasilia.