In Spain, football matches knock thousands of websites and online services offline
Spain's football season kick-off has revived LaLiga's court-backed mass IP blocking against piracy, but thousands see websites and services fail whenever a match begins.
Every new football season in Spain introduces aggressive digital filtering measures. LaLiga, led by Javier Tebas, orders Spanish operators to block IP addresses tied to illegal broadcasting. This aims to curb piracy, but the real effect is widespread: dedicated servers for each website mean that when an IP is cut off, many other services are also affected. LaLiga's court-ordered power to block IPs causes collateral damage for internet users accessing websites and online services.
Rather than blocking individual IP addresses, LaLiga uses a single address to serve multiple websites. When this parent address is blocked, countless websites stop functioning, impacting innocent parties like courts, universities, AI LLM model hosts, and even some football clubs' websites and sponsors.
LaLiga claims these blocks are dynamic and targeted, but OONI estimates that over 554,000 legitimate domains were affected in the first half of 2026. Cloudflare, handling 90% of affected domains despite only 30% of blocked IPs, suffered the most damage. The blocks start shortly before match kick-off and end when the broadcast concludes, with around 550 IP addresses blocked per match, increasing to 500-1,000 per match.
This blocking method impacts not just pirate streaming services but also unrelated websites, including educational, advocacy, and technology domains. Users experience complete inaccessibility for certain sites during matches, even when using VPNs. LaLiga's claims that the blocks target only a few "geeks" are contradicted by the widespread impact on thousands of websites and online services across Spain.
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