Cloudflare CEO Seeks to Steer Clear of Musk’s Brazil Feud Over X

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(Bloomberg) -- Network provider Cloudflare Inc neither helped Elon Musk’s X evade a ban in Brazil nor assisted the country’s regulators as they sought to restore the block, its chief executive officer said Monday.

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X abruptly went live for users across Brazil last week after an automatic update changed its structure to use IP addresses associated with Cloudflare, a cyber security company that helps many websites route their traffic. The technical change allowed X to briefly get around the ban Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered on Aug. 30.

Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, later said it had received support from Cloudflare as it sought to restore the ban, claims CEO Matthew Prince denies.

“I don’t know what the Brazilian authorities are talking about,” Prince said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We didn’t specifically work with them to block X or to make X available again in Brazil.”

“There was nothing that X asked us to do in terms of eliminating the ability for Brazil to block the content inside of Brazil, and there was nothing we did to further facilitate the ability for Brazil to block what they were already doing,” he said.

Anatel declined to comment.

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the platform formerly known as Twitter blocked in Brazil after its billionaire owner refused to comply with judicial orders to take down certain user profiles and appoint a legal representative in the country.

Musk, a self-styled free speech warrior, has publicly sparred with the judge for months, claiming the efforts to moderate content are akin to censorship.

A spokesperson for X said last week that the sudden return of the site was “inadvertent and temporary,” the result of its decision to change network providers.

Prince said he was surprised by the attention the episode drew to Cloudflare, but that it was an unplanned event that came with taking on a new client.

“We won a deal with them where they stopped using a competitor of ours and in the process the IP address switched,” Prince said. “It was a coincidence of us winning an enterprise customer.”

While X remains blocked in Brazil, the company informed the court last week that it had appointed a legal representative and begun following orders to block accounts accused of disseminating fake news and hate speech.