BLACKOUT MAP
كل المقالاتتابع @Blackoutmap_net على X

Analysis ·

LaLiga's IP blocks: why half a million websites break in Spain on match days

هذا المقال باللغة الإنجليزية.

مشاركة
Updated 24 October, 21:10 UTC
  • First version.

Tomorrow evening Barcelona play Real Madrid. For millions of people in Spain that also means a slice of the internet will stop working: online shops, payment pages, software downloads, charities, even this website. Not because of an outage, but because LaLiga has Spain's biggest internet providers block IP addresses on match days, and one address can carry hundreds of thousands of websites.

Live: is LaLiga blocking IPs right now? We test Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, DIGI and MásMóvil from inside their own networks every 10 minutes on match days, and you can check whether your website is affected.

What is happening

  • 18 December 2024 Commercial Court No. 6 of Barcelona sides with LaLiga and Telefónica Audiovisual Digital: Spanish ISPs must cut off IP addresses that LaLiga links to pirate football streams. The list is updated every week without a new court order for each address. Movistar, Vodafone, DIGI and MásOrange did not contest the case.
  • February 2025 The blocks start. Within days, website owners all over Spain find their sites unreachable on match days.
  • March 2025 The court rejects challenges from Cloudflare and RootedCON, finding that harm to third parties had not been shown. Cloudflare then takes the case to the Constitutional Court; we found no ruling on it so far.
  • 17 February 2026 A commercial court in Córdoba orders NordVPN and Proton VPN to block LaLiga's addresses for users in Spain too, without hearing them first. Proton said it had not even been notified.
  • 29 April 2026 The Spanish Congress passes a non-binding motion asking for proportionality limits on blocking orders like this.
  • 30 June 2026 OONI publishes the largest measurement of the collateral damage so far (below).
  • 2026/27 season The blocks continue on every match day. According to Euronews, the current order runs until 20 June 2027.

Why websites that have nothing to do with football go down

A pirate stream rarely has its own address. It usually sits behind a big provider like Cloudflare, which serves thousands of websites from the same shared IP addresses. When an ISP drops every connection to such an address, it cannot tell the stream apart from the bakery, the newspaper or the payment page next to it: they all disappear for everyone on that network.

OONI found that blocking just 4 to 20 addresses for one hour was enough to affect more than 400,000 domains. One single blocked Squarespace address carried 18,592 of them.

What OONI measured (January – June 2026)

  • 554,507 domains blocked in Spain at some point, out of 9.2 million tested, and OONI calls that a lower bound.
  • 7,441 blocked IP addresses at 36 providers, including Amazon, Cloudflare, Akamai, Microsoft and Meta.
  • Cloudflare held 30% of the blocked addresses but 90% of the affected domains: more than 501,000.
  • DIGI did not just drop connections: it intercepted encrypted (TLS) connections with its own certificate.

Who was hit, among others

  • Charities and rights groups: Amnesty International chapters, Greenpeace, UNICEF, UNHCR, Caritas.
  • Everyday services: Linux Mint, Goodreads, Hugging Face, model downloads from Ollama.
  • Redsys, the payment gateway behind many Spanish shops, with failed card payments on match days (Euronews).
  • Courts, universities, a supermarket chain, and the websites of some football clubs and sponsors.

LaLiga says the blocks are "dynamic" and "neither massive nor indiscriminate", and puts its losses from piracy at €600–700 million a year. OONI notes that Cloudflare sponsored part of its research, which it says it carried out independently.

What we measured tonight

We started our own measurements on 24 October, during Atlético – Deportivo. Our first round at 20:26 Madrid time found all five ISPs blocking: Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, DIGI and MásMóvil. In the two and a half hours after that we saw 19 different blocked addresses, every one of them Cloudflare's. A Spanish network that does not block (Aire Networks) reached the same addresses without trouble, which is how we know it is the ISP and not the website.

One of those addresses, 188.114.96.3, is the address of blackoutmap.net. It was blocked in every test, on every ISP. So while matches are on, most people in Spain cannot open this website either, including the live LaLiga status page we built to show the blocks.

How we measure: probes of Globalping, a public measurement network, sitting on each ISP's own network, request a handful of addresses that are often blocked. Candidate addresses come from the public list of hayahora.futbol; every result we show is our own measurement. See the live results and timeline.

Tomorrow

Sunday 25 October has four matches: Athletic – Getafe at 14:00, Celta Vigo – Betis at 16:15, Real Sociedad – Levante at 18:30 and Barcelona – Real Madrid at 21:00 (Madrid time; the clocks go back that night). Blocks usually start before the first kick-off and end after the last match, so expect parts of the web to be unreachable from Spanish home and mobile connections for most of the afternoon and evening.

What you can do

If a website won't load

  • Use Cloudflare's free 1.1.1.1 app in WARP mode (not "1.1.1.1" mode), a VPN, iCloud Private Relay in Safari, or Opera's built-in VPN or Tor Browser.
  • Or switch to mobile data from a different ISP.
  • Changing your DNS does not help: the website is found fine, it's the connection to its address that is cut.

If you run a website

  • Check your domain: we show whether any of its addresses has been blocked.
  • Keep a record of dates and times; our timeline shows exactly when each ISP was blocking.
  • Ask your provider about other or dedicated addresses. Any shared address can be hit on the next match day.

Sources

شارك هذا المقال

Blackout Map is a live map of internet outages and shutdowns around the world. Open the map · Security watch · RSS · Follow us on X: @Blackoutmap_net

كل المقالات

تابع القراءة

Retrospective · Pakistan, February 2008The day Pakistan took YouTube offline for the whole worldIn 2008 a national block on YouTube leaked into the internet's routing system and made the site unreachable worldwide for about two hours. Retrospective · Worldwide, October 2021The six hours Facebook disappeared from the internetIn October 2021 one routine command took Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp off the internet for billions of people. No attack, no country outage. Explainer · 21 Oct 2026 115Can a software flaw take the internet down?Ten years after the Mirai attack on Dyn: how security flaws turn into outages, the times they did, and what Blackout Map can and cannot see.

المزيد من المدونة

Security · 21 Oct 2026 15,398PHP2Shell: what we know about the two critical PHP flaws (fix out)Two critical flaws in PHP, the language behind about 70% of websites, can let anyone run code on a server with one request. The fix is out: how the attack works, what is confirmed, what to do, and what it could mean for the internet. Security · 21 Oct 2026 647Node.js security release: ten fixes, one that can run codeOn the same day as PHP2Shell, Node.js fixed ten flaws in its 22, 24 and 26 lines, including a Brotli decoder bug that can allow remote code execution and several ways around TLS hostname checks. What is affected and what to do. Retrospective · Iran, February 2026 226Iran's wartime blackout: 88 days cut off from the worldFrom the first strikes on 28 February to 26 May 2026, Iran was almost completely cut off from the internet: 2,093 hours, the longest nationwide shutdown on record. What happened, how it worked and what it cost. Retrospective · West Africa, March 2024West Africa lost four undersea cables in one dayA suspected underwater landslide off Côte d'Ivoire broke four cables at once in March 2024. Ghana was in blackout for almost a week, Côte d'Ivoire fell to 1% of normal. Retrospective · Canada, July 2022How a maintenance update took down Canada's RogersIn July 2022 one update in Rogers' core network cut mobile, home internet, debit payments and emergency calls for millions of Canadians for most of a day. Retrospective · Tonga, January 2022Tonga: the volcano that cut a country offThe 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption shredded the only cable linking Tonga to the world. The country was almost completely offline for five weeks. Retrospective · Myanmar, February 2021Myanmar 2021: a coup, and an internet curfewAfter the February 2021 coup, Myanmar's military cut the internet nationwide, then every night, then all mobile data: a shutdown shaped by the hour. Retrospective · Tigray, Ethiopia, November 2020Tigray: two years without a connectionFrom November 2020, the war in Ethiopia's Tigray region came with a phone and internet blackout that lasted about two years. Retrospective · Iran, November 2019Iran, November 2019: a country offline for a weekDuring the 2019 fuel protests Iran cut itself off from the internet almost completely, while keeping parts of its domestic network running. Retrospective · Jammu and Kashmir, India, August 2019Kashmir: 550 days without full internetThe shutdown that began in August 2019 became the longest ever imposed in a democracy. High-speed mobile internet only returned in February 2021. Retrospective · Egypt, January 2011Egypt 2011: the night a country switched off its internetIn January 2011, two days into mass protests, Egypt withdrew almost all its routes from the internet within minutes. It stayed dark for five days.