Flutura Kusari and Adriatik Kelmendi Blame Kurti for a Global Cloudflare Meltdown
The world saw a Cloudflare crash, but Flutura Kusari and Adriatik Kelmendi insisted Kosovo’s government caused it, turning a global fault into partisan fiction.
I was in London when the internet fell over1. Not all of it, just enough to remind us how little of it we actually see. X would not load. Others2 threw up a politely panicked error page about an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network” and suggested, with the optimism of a bad therapist, that I “try again in a few minutes”. Letterboxd stuttered. Down Detector, the site that exists to tell us when everything is broken, was itself broken. For a few hours, the web looked like a half-finished skeleton lit by faulty wiring.
In the background, the Cloudflare status page muttered in corporate Esperanto. “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.” A “fix” was “implemented”. Services were “recovering”. Somewhere, a team of exhausted engineers tried to keep thirty per cent of the Fortune 100 from screaming at their account managers. It was a simple story, technically. One company, sitting quietly between users and services, had malfunctioned. When the gatekeeper tripped, the traffic jammed.
Then my phone lit up with screenshots from Kosovo.
While Cloudflare was scrambling to get content back online, a very different kind of outage was taking shape on Albanian Facebook. There was Flutura Kusari, a lawyer who has built an international career branding herself as a defender of press freedom, posting in conspiratorial tones about access problems in Kosovo and implying that the government might be behind them3. There was Adriatik Kelmendi of Klan Kosova, one of the country’s most aggressively partisan broadcasters, singing from the same hymn sheet. Global infrastructure fault? Apparently not. Potential government censorship4. The choreography was almost elegant in its cynicism.
This is the part where you are expected to say it was a misunderstanding. A moment of confusion. People saw errors, panicked, and grasped for explanations. That would be comforting, but it would also be wrong. If you have been paying attention to how these actors behave when there is no Cloudflare outage to exploit, the pattern is already familiar. Any malfunction, any bureaucratic snag, any inconvenience with a screen attached is fed into the same machine. In their script, the reformist government in Prishtina is always the villain5. The real sources of power, the oligarchs and their media courtiers and various foreign interests, drift quietly offstage.
From London, I watched two outages unfolding in parallel. One was technical, global, and boring. The other was local, deliberate, and corrosive.
Cloudflare is, as one British cybersecurity professor helpfully told the press, an “internet shield”. It filters attacks and shuttles content around the globe. Its clients include X, Spotify, Zoom, and a long list of companies whose names appear in earnings reports more often than in conversation. The upside of such centralisation is efficiency. The downside is obvious. When your shield collapses, everything hiding behind it is suddenly naked.
Kosovo has its own shields. Not routers and data centres, but a dense mesh of media outlets and NGO celebrities who present themselves as guardians of “media freedom” and “European values” while acting, in practice, as the distribution network for a small number of very terrestrial interests. When that network glitches, it is not websites you lose. It is reality.
I have been writing about one of its key nodes for some time: Flutura Kusari.
On paper, she is a senior legal adviser at the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom and a member of Europe’s anti-SLAPP steering committee. Her job, allegedly, is to protect journalists and citizens from abusive lawsuits designed to extinguish criticism. In practice, she has used that prestige like a cudgel.
In July this year I wrote about her failed criminal complaint against a citizen of Kosovo6, Mentor Llugaliu. His offence was not assault, stalking or blackmail. It was criticism. Over a series of social media posts, he mocked and challenged her public conduct. One of his great “transgressions” was to refer to her by a satirical nickname, “Mickoja.” You would think someone who lives online would be used to that. Instead, Kusari filed a criminal complaint for harassment and stalking.
The law in Kosovo is clear. Article 182 of the Criminal Code requires a pattern of behaviour that causes genuine fear or threatens a person’s safety. The Basic Prosecution in Prishtina looked at the evidence and did its job. There had been no contact. No threat. No credible fear. In plain language, there was no crime. They dismissed the case. The Appeal upheld the dismissal. Normally, this would be the end of a bad idea.
But Kusari is not a normal complainant. Before the prosecution had even finished examining her file, she had already begun to convert a private grievance into an international cause. Organisations like IFEX, Index on Censorship, the International Press Institute and her own ECPMF issued statements framing her complaint as a press freedom test case, as if a woman with institutional power dragging a citizen into court for using a nickname were the same as a journalist facing a strategic lawsuit from a billionaire. These statements did not materialise spontaneously. They were solicited and curated, then fed back into the domestic process as moral leverage.
When that did not work, when the prosecutors and judges declined to confuse embarrassment with crime, she escalated again. On 31 July she took to Facebook and named the prosecutors responsible: Kushtrim Zeka at the Basic Prosecution and Shkëlzen Brahimi at Appeal. She accused them not simply of misinterpreting the law, but of failing her personally. NGOs close to her, including women’s organisations, hurried to publish near-identical statements calling on the Kosovo Prosecutorial Council to evaluate the prosecutors’ performance. In a country where careers can be buried by that sort of reputational pressure, the subtext was obvious.
This is not transparency. It is intimidation in high definition.
Let us be precise about what happened here. A lawyer whose professional brand is “anti-SLAPP” filed a criminal complaint against a critic. She then engineered a wave of international endorsements to dress up her personal offence as a global rights issue. When the legal system refused to criminalise criticism, she mobilised allies to name and shame individual prosecutors. The message to the entire judiciary was unmistakable. Rule against me and I will unleash my network on you. It is the SLAPP playbook, only dressed in the vocabulary of feminism and human rights.
Now place that behaviour alongside her other choices.
In September 2023, when Serbian-backed paramilitaries crossed into Kosovo at Banjska and killed a police officer, she did not centre her anger on the men with guns or the state that armed them. Instead she attacked her own government and accused it of “dangerous experiments”7. In June 2025, when the Palace of Justice in Prishtina became a sauna because of banal infrastructural incompetence, she did not go after the architects of that dysfunction. She blamed the Interior Minister and accused the LVV government of trying to undermine judicial independence.
But when journalist Jeta Xharra won a major SLAPP case against Devolli Corporation8, one of the most politically wired conglomerates in Kosovo, Kusari offered no public support. No statement. No solidarity. When major investigations by Osservatorio sui Balcani and EurActiv exposed how the Devolli brothers used Klan Kosova9 as a private propaganda machine, censoring stories that threatened their empire and deploying media offensively against state institutions, Kusari had nothing to say.
Her silence is not an absence of opinion. It is alignment.
Klan Kosova sits at the centre of this dynamic. It is not a media outlet in any meaningful sense. It is a gilded bunker for oligarchs who masquerade as journalists. Reporters inside it are reportedly forbidden from covering scandals that touch the Devolli conglomerate. The US embargo on Comodita Home10 for price manipulation was met with editorial silence. When the government moved to revoke Klan Kosova’s licence in 2023 because it was registered in Serbia, the station responded with a manic campaign against Prime Minister Albin Kurti. News bulletins turned into open letters on behalf of wounded wealth.
Inside this ecosystem, multiple employees have described Kusari’s close relationship with Kushtrim Gojani, the man presented as Klan Kosova’s owner and a figure tied into the Devolli universe. One photograph, taken discreetly in the station’s buffet area, shows her in apparent personal conversation with him during the very period when the government was trying to bring the channel into compliance with Kosovo’s constitutional order. Moderators at the station have admitted, off the record, that they feel uneasy reading scripts that echo Serbian narratives. Kusari, the supposed watchdog, does not bark.
Instead, she reserves her teeth for targets that suit the old guard. A citizen who called her “Mickoja.” Prosecutors who refused to bend. A government that threatens, even mildly, the cosy fusion of business and media that has smothered Kosovo’s public life for years.
Seen from this angle, her behaviour during the Cloudflare outage is not a slip. It is reflex. A technical breakdown became an excuse for political theatre. A status page about “internal server errors on Cloudflare’s network” was ignored in favour of an insinuation that maybe Kurti’s government was blocking services. Kelmendi, whose income flows from Devolli-linked structures, followed suit. The story wrote itself because it was already written.
Hannah Arendt once remarked that the ideal subject of authoritarian rule is not the convinced believer but the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction has collapsed. In Kosovo, that collapse is not an accident. It is programmed into the nightly running order. When paramilitaries attack, somehow it becomes the government’s fault. When Devolli sues journalists, the story becomes a “business dispute”. When Klan Kosova is told to obey the constitution, the narrative becomes the “death of media freedom”. When Cloudflare goes down and half the planet’s digital life seizes up, it becomes an opportunity to hint at political sabotage in Prishtina.
From London, some readers may be tempted to see all this as parochial. A small country, a handful of names, the usual Balkan intrigue. It is not. It is a study in how liberal language can be captured and redeployed as counter-insurgency against democratic reform. It is also a lesson in infrastructure. Put too much trust in a single company like Cloudflare and you end up in the dark when it stumbles. Put too much trust in a small circle of “media freedom” personalities and oligarch-owned broadcasters and you end up with something worse than darkness. You get a flood of manufactured light designed to blind you.
The Basic Prosecution Office in Prishtina said clearly that Mentor Llugaliu had committed no crime. The Appeal confirmed it. That should have been the end of the matter. Instead, a lawyer with international credentials decided that if the law would not bend, the people applying it would have to be bent instead. When NGOs piled in to name prosecutors and demand reviews, they were not defending women. They were sending a warning to every future prosecutor who will ever touch a file with Flutura Kusari’s name on it. Remember what happened to the last ones.
This is how you sabotage a fragile democracy without firing a shot. Not by banning newspapers, but by hollowing out the meaning of rights. Not by shutting down broadcasters, but by ensuring that the loudest ones operate as house organs for oligarchs. Not by openly attacking the judiciary, but by cloaking intimidation in the language of accountability.
Cloudflare’s outage will be dissected by engineers who will talk about redundancy and single points of failure. They will ask whether we have become too dependent on invisible infrastructure. Kosovo’s crisis will not get that kind of sober treatment. It will be buried under the next manufactured scandal, the next NGO statement, the next talk show where oligarch-funded pundits perform outrage on cue.
But the questions are the same.
Who owns the pipes? Who controls the switches? And when the system fails, is it a bug or the feature it was built for all along?
And so we arrive at the only question that still matters, and it is not about Cloudflare, or Devolli, or even Kosovo. It is about Europe’s respectable infrastructure of principle.
Why, in November 2025, after prosecutors in Prishtina have twice rejected Flutura Kusari’s criminal complaint against a critic, after her public naming and shaming of individual prosecutors, after her studied silence on a landmark SLAPP defeat for Devolli, after her alignment, in deed if not in slogan, with oligarch media that treat “press freedom” as a fig leaf for power, is she still presented to the continent as a neutral expert, a defender of journalists, an anti-SLAPP authority?
Why is the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom still employing her as a senior adviser? Why are IFEX, IPI, Index on Censorship and the rest still happy to have their names stapled to statements she engineers, as if nothing has happened and nothing has been learned?
At some point this stops looking like an oversight and starts looking like consent. Either these organisations have not done the most basic due diligence on a person they send into fragile democracies as their emissary, or they have done it and decided that the behaviour described above is compatible with their values. One possibility speaks of negligence, the other of complicity. Both shred the sermonising tone they reserve for the Balkans. If a lawyer who has tried to criminalise criticism, mobilise international outfits against her own prosecutors, and sit comfortably within an oligarch-media ecosystem is still treated as a model practitioner, then the problem is not just Flutura Kusari. It is the institutions that looked at all of this, looked at the documentation, looked at the attack on my own family home11, and concluded that the greater risk lay in admitting they might have been wrong about one of their own. They tell us, every 2 November12, that silence in the face of intimidation is a form of impunity.
Very well.
The facts are on the table, the pattern is no longer deniable, the damage to Kosovo’s public sphere is measurable. If ECPMF and its partners choose, even now, to look away and carry on, then the next time they lecture a government about “European standards” one question will hang in the air, unanswered but unavoidable: if you will not clean your own house, what business do you have inspecting anyone else’s?
The Cartelisation of Kosovo’s Press
I have spent the past fifteen months doing what good journalism always does at its most unfashionable, asking the press to look in the mirror. The weekend of 11 October 2025, when vandals smashed the windows of my family’s unoccupied house in Kosovo and desecrated our memorial car
Cloudflare down latest: ‘Fix’ update issued after X, ChatGPT and more websites suffer mass outage — The Independent.
Cloudflare outage disrupts X, ChatGPT and thousands of sites — Perplexity.
Flutura Kusari’s Facebook Post, Nov 17, 2025.
Adriatik Kelmendi’s Facebook Post, Nov 17, 2025.
How to Topple a Reformer Without Firing a Shot
Kosovo’s Prime Minister resigned to follow the law. His enemies used it to break the system. In the void, a coup bloomed quiet, legal, lethal. — The GPC Politics.
How a Press Freedom Icon Became a Political Actor
Flutura Kusari built a reputation defending press freedom. Now, she stands accused of using that same power to silence a citizen who challenged her. — The GPC I Unit.
A Voice for the Past: How Flutura Kusari Shields Kosovo’s Old Guard While Attacking Its Future
Kusari presents herself as a legal advocate. But her record reveals a clear and deliberate pattern: attacking the LVV-led government at every opportunity, regardless of the facts. — The GPC I Unit.
BIRN Wins Landmark SLAPP Case Against Devolli Corporation — Prishtina Insight.
Journalism Is Dead. Klan Kosova Pulled the Trigger.
Klan Kosova isn’t a media outlet. It’s a gilded bunker for oligarchs masquerading as journalists, waging war on truth while prostituting public trust. — The GPC Media Watch.
Devolli Dilemma: Kosovo’s Oligarchs, Diplomatic Entanglements, and the Echoes of Trade Malpractice
The Devolli saga: A deep dive into alleged tax embezzlement, dubious international ties, and the shadow of trade malpractice shaking Kosovo’s political and economic landscape. — The GPC I Unit.
PRESS RELEASE: Journalist Vudi Xhymshiti Condemns Vandalism of Family Home in Kosovo
Investigative journalist Vudi Xhymshiti condemns the vandalism of his family home in Kosovo, calling it a criminal intimidation linked to his exposés on Serbian espionage networks. — Official Dispatches.
International Day to End Impunity 2025: ECPMF’s Silence Is the Crime
On the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, 2/11, I speak of ECPMF, because its silence is impunity, polished and European. — The GPC Weekend Dispatch.