A day after X became available again to some people in Brazil, the country’s Supreme Court threatened heavy daily fines against the social media company and Elon Musk-owned Starlink. In a new order posted online, Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered regulators to “restart” blocking X, saying the companies could be fined nearly $1 million per day if they didn’t comply.
The latest order from Moraes, who has been publicly sparring with Musk for months, comes after X was regained access for many users in Brazil on Wednesday. The company said in an earlier statement that the change was an “inadvertent temporary restoration of service” as a result of a change in network provider.
Following last month’s Brazilian ban, X has reportedly started using Cloudflare’s servers in the region, making it harder for Brazilian ISPs to enforce the block. said Wednesday The company said it was changing network providers “to serve Latin America” and expected its services in Brazil to be offline again “soon.”
Moraes now says X could face fines worth the equivalent of $921,000 per day for each day it “fails to comply” with the ban from September 19. Starlink, whose Brazilian bank accounts were frozen during the dispute, faces “joint liability” if X doesn’t pay, according to the order. Moraes also ordered Brazil’s internet regulator to “take immediate measures to block ‘CDN Cloudflare, Fastly and EdgeUno’ servers and similar servers created to circumvent the court order that suspended the old Twitter’s operations in Brazil, preventing access to their platforms.”
Company X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
