Cloudflare CEO Calls X's Brief Return in Brazil a "Wild Coincidence"
X briefly reappears in Brazil after switching from Fastly to Cloudflare, an IT migration that accidentally bypasses the country's Supreme Court block. Cloudflare's CEO insists the timing is purely coincidental and denies helping Elon Musk evade the ban.
X briefly goes back online in Brazil three weeks after the country's Supreme Court orders a block on Elon Musk's social media platform. The sudden return prompts Brazil's top court to threaten X Corp. with fines of nearly $1 million per day for remaining accessible. However, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince states that this unexpected accessibility is simply a "wild coincidence" rather than a deliberate attempt to bypass the legal restrictions.
The disruption occurs because X switches its cloud computing services from Fastly to Cloudflare, a transition that naturally assigns new IP addresses to the platform. Since Brazilian internet service providers block X by targeting its specific IP addresses, changing to Cloudflare's infrastructure inadvertently removes the technical barriers. Prince emphasizes that his sales team simply won a contract to provide services in Latin America and denies any communication with X about circumventing the Brazilian ban.
Despite Cloudflare's insistence that the timing is accidental, some observers find the coincidence hard to believe given Musk's previous attempts to skirt the ban using his Starlink satellites. X claims the network change was a necessary response to infrastructure disruptions across Latin America caused by the initial Brazilian shutdown. Meanwhile, Brazilian regulators report that Cloudflare is fully cooperating with authorities to help reblock the platform using the newly assigned IP addresses.