The platform went dark across Brazil on Saturday, sending online commentators to new digital town squares.
As the clock struck midnight in Brazil, the feed stopped refreshing.
The social network X, formerly Twitter, began to go dark Saturday across Latin America’s largest nation after a Brazilian Supreme Court justice ordered its blackout just hours earlier. It was the culmination of a monthslong battle between that justice, Alexandre de Moraes, and X’s owner, Elon Musk, over what can be said online in Brazil.
In recent weeks, Mr. Musk said X would stop complying with Justice Moraes’s court orders to suspend certain accounts. After Justice Moraes threatened arrests of X employees, Mr. Musk pulled X’s team from Brazil. Justice Moraes responded by blocking X on Friday.
Hours later, millions of Brazilians woke up on Saturday to a social network that would not load. Users on the app still saw a timeline, but the posts were frozen from Friday night. Those who tried to open the website were met with a blank screen, as if the site did not exist.
Some customers of the few internet providers that had not yet complied with the ban as of Saturday morning posted excitedly on X that they could still use the service, and the phrase “it didn’t go down” began trending on X. (One of those providers was Starlink, the satellite internet service run by SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s space company.)
But for the most part, Brazilian Twitter had logged off — and the rest of the world suddenly realized just how much of the site had been powered by the extremely online nation of 200 million people. (At nine hours and 32 minutes a day, Brazilians rank second globally in average daily internet use, just after South Africans, according to Proxyrack, an internet infrastructure provider.)
On Friday night, a string of goodbye posts began appearing from popular X accounts, including many fan accounts for certain celebrities. “As all administrators are Brazilian, it will not be possible for us to continue with activities at this time,” read a post from the user @21metgala, which posts updates about celebrities to its nearly 176,000 followers. “We’ll be on Bluesky and Instagram. 🤍”