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

Updated 24 October, 21:10 UTC

24 Oct 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.