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Elon Musk’s X temporarily became accessible again in Brazil despite government orders requiring Internet service providers to block the social network. X’s revival was enabled by the company switching to a different network provider, namely Cloudflare, but Cloudflare reportedly made changes that allow ISPs to resume their blocking of X.
“When X was shut down in Brazil, our infrastructure to provide service to Latin America was no longer accessible to our team,” X’s Global Government Affairs account said last night. “To continue providing optimal service to our users, we changed network providers. This change resulted in an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users. While we expect the platform to be inaccessible again shortly, we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil.”
X’s statement that restoration of service in Brazil was “inadvertent” surprised Abrint, a trade group for Brazilian ISPs. The BBC quoted Abrint official Basílio Rodriguez Pérez as saying, “everything that happened during the day led us to believe that it was on purpose.”
ISPs serving Brazil, including Musk’s Starlink service, have been blocking X for the last two weeks under orders from the government. Brazil Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered the blocking after X refused to suspend accounts accused of spreading disinformation, including accounts belonging to supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro. De Moraes also seized $2 million from a Starlink bank account and $1.3 million from an X account to collect on fines issued to X.
De Moraes issued a new order after X’s reemergence, saying X would face a daily fine of more than $900,000 for failing to comply with the order suspending X operations in Brazil. Starlink could again be forced to pay the fine because Brazil has been treating the Musk-controlled companies as one economic group. De Moraes also ordered Anatel, Brazil’s telecom regulatory agency, to ensure that the blocking of X is reinstated.
Cloudflare isolates X traffic to let blocking resume
Though X’s statement didn’t name its new network provider, reports said that X started routing traffic through Cloudflare. As a result, blocking IP addresses used by X could make other sites that rely on Cloudflare inaccessible.
“A person close to Cloudflare, who was not authorized to speak publicly about a business relationship, said the network services provider did not do anything specifically to help X get around Brazil’s ban,” according to The Associated Press. “Rather, X recently switched to Cloudflare from another provider, which could be a reason the block is not working. This person added that the workaround likely won’t last long.”
Cloudflare reportedly agreed to isolate X’s traffic so that ISPs could resume blocking the platform without affecting other websites used by Cloudflare. The change apparently came after Cloudflare was contacted by Anatel, Brazil’s telecom regulatory agency.
“You can’t just block Cloudflare because you would block half of the Internet,” Perez said, according to The New York Times. Cloudflare services are used by many websites, including those of the Brazilian government and banks, he said.
“But hours later, Anatel’s president, Carlos Baigorri, said in an interview that Cloudflare had agreed to isolate Internet traffic from X, enabling Brazilian Internet providers to easily target and block that traffic,” the NYT wrote. Baigorri said that “Cloudflare has been extremely cooperative.”
We contacted Cloudflare today, asking the company to describe the changes it made and the specific services being used by X, but Cloudflare did not answer our question. In response, a Cloudflare spokesperson pointed us to the X statement quoted earlier in this article.
Dynamic IP addresses
Abrint released a statement explaining why X’s use of Cloudflare made it difficult for ISPs to comply with Brazil’s blocking order. Before X switched to Cloudflare, it “used specific, blockable IPs,” but is now using dynamic IP addresses that change constantly and are shared with many other services.
“The main difficulty in blocking Cloudflare is that it operates as a reverse proxy, with IPs that change frequently,” Abrint said. “Blocking Cloudflare would mean blocking not only X, but also a number of other services that rely on this infrastructure, which could negatively affect the Internet as a whole.”
Abrint yesterday advised that ISPs not take action on their own and instead wait for guidance from Anatel.
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