Brazil’s Twitter Faces Blackout Amid Supreme Court Conflict

Darkness Falls on Brazil’s Twitter: A Supreme Court Showdown

As the clock struck midnight in Brazil, the once-vibrant social network X, formerly known as Twitter, began to fade into darkness. The platform went silent across Latin America’s largest nation on Saturday, following an urgent order from Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes to enforce a complete blackout. This marked the climax of a protracted and contentious battle between Justice Moraes and X’s owner, Elon Musk, over the boundaries of online speech in Brazil.

In the weeks leading up to this moment, Musk had publicly declared that X would cease to comply with Justice Moraes’s directives to suspend specific accounts. Tensions escalated when Justice Moraes threatened to arrest X employees for noncompliance. In response, Musk withdrew X’s operational team from Brazil, prompting Justice Moraes to retaliate by blocking the platform on Friday.

As a result, millions of Brazilians awoke on Saturday to find a social network that would not load. While users on the app could still see their timelines, the posts were eerily frozen in time from Friday night. Those attempting to access the website were greeted with a stark blank screen, as if the platform had simply vanished from existence.

However, some customers of a few internet providers who had yet to comply with the ban as of Saturday morning shared excited updates on X, claiming they could still access the service. The phrase “it didn’t go down” quickly began trending, fueled in part by users connected to Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace venture.

For the majority, though, Brazilian Twitter had effectively logged off, and the world outside suddenly grasped the significance of this platform, which had been heavily driven by the extremely online culture of Brazil’s 200 million inhabitants. According to Proxyrack, an internet infrastructure provider, Brazilians rank second globally in average daily internet usage, spending an astonishing nine hours and 32 minutes online each day, just behind South Africa.

As Friday night unfolded, a wave of farewell messages began to populate the platform from prominent X accounts, particularly from fan-driven pages dedicated to various celebrities. One such farewell from the user @21metgala, which boasts nearly 176,000 followers and focuses on celebrity updates, poignantly stated, “As all administrators are Brazilian, it will not be possible for us to continue with activities at this time. We’ll be on Bluesky and Instagram. 🤍”