A day after Brazil’s Supreme Court cleared billionaire Elon Musk’s platform to resume service for complying with the country’s top court’s demands, Internet Service Providers began restoring access to X in Brazil on Wednesday. The social media giant remained inaccessible to millions of Brazilians for over a month after Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered X, formerly Twitter, to block certain accounts and pay outstanding fines as part of a crackdown on misinformation.
The court had frozen bank accounts for X and the company’s satellite internet provider, Starlink, to cover the fines. Moraes also demanded that X name a legal representative in Brazil and allow the government to audit its financial records. Despite initially refusing to do either, X ultimately complied with the demands and paid the fines.
According to a report from ABRINT, Brazil’s leading trade group for ISPs, X appears to have switched from servers managed by Cloudflare to ones that use dynamic internet protocols, meaning the server addresses change frequently. That could have helped evade the blocking measures that led to X’s initial suspension in Brazil. The company also uses a different domain to prevent Internet Service Providers from blocking its domain.
It needs to be clarified whether the move will be permanent or if X will continue to use dynamic IPs in other markets. Those changes could make it easier to block the platform again. The move comes as the social media giant faces increased competition in Brazil from rival apps such as Threads and Bluesky, which have gained millions of users during X’s downtime. The dispute also highlights a continuing tension between Musk, who bills himself as a defender of free speech, and governments seeking to limit online misinformation.
In a statement released on its Global Affairs account on Tuesday, X said it was “proud to return to Brazil” after the Supreme Court lifted its ban. It promised to “continue to defend freedom of speech, within the boundaries of law” in its operating countries.
Some users began posting about X’s return on the service’s official Twitter account. Some even addressed de Moraes, urging him not to block the site again.
Topics such as “we’re back” were trending on Wednesday in Latin America’s biggest country, indicating that some X users were already accessing the platform.
The move came a day after Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, said it had begun ordering internet providers to allow users to reaccess X. The agency said the order was part of a broader effort to stop the spread of fake news and rumors ahead of municipal elections in November.
Brazil’s Supreme Court has previously ruled that X violated constitutional guarantees of free expression and privacy when it banned the service last month. In a separate ruling, the Supreme Court froze assets belonging to X and the company’s satellite internet service in Brazil, including the bank accounts of its owner, Elon Musk.
