It’s Sunday. You remember an important payment you forgot to send, but when you try to access your online banking, the website is down. You turn to ChatGPT for a workaround, but the chatbot won’t respond. Resigned, you try to scroll through Instagram while finishing your coffee, but it won’t load.
This has become a typical day in Spain whenever the football is on. It isn’t a strange marketing tactic to drive viewership. Instead, it’s collateral damage from heavy-handed efforts to stop fans watching matches illegally.
Spain’s major football league, La Liga, is escalating its battle against piracy. Every weekend since last autumn, the league has enforced IP blocking orders with the help of the country’s largest telecom group, Telefónica.
The Madrid City Council website, various banking apps, and productivity tools like ChatGPT, Grammarly, and Microsoft have all been caught in the crossfire. Even GitHub, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and the US government’s Freedom.gov portal have fallen victim to this overblocking.
Why legitimate sites are going dark on matchdays
There are several ways internet service providers (ISPs) can block unwanted websites online — ranging from deploying advanced Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to manipulating the Domain Name System (DNS).
However, Spanish ISPs are increasingly blocking content by restricting access to specific IP addresses. Because multiple websites often share the same root IP address — particularly when hosted on a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare — this method is “highly likely to have collateral effects,” Alissa Starzak, Cloudflare’s Vice President and Global Head of Public Policy, told TechRadar.
LaLiga has been ordering Spanish ISPs to block ~3000 IP addresses almost every weekend. Because Cloudflare IPs are shared, this has been doing massive collateral damage to thousands of legitimate websites, apps, and vital services – all at the whim of a private corporation. pic.twitter.com/MmonW1BXgjFebruary 17, 2026
Some IP addresses may have “hundreds of thousands, or even millions of domains behind them,” Starzak told TechRadar. As a result, blocking a single IP to restrict access to one website “comes with a tremendous amount of collateral damage.”
This technical infrastructure is the reason for Spain’s high toll of collateral damage and explains why Cloudflare chose to contest the system in court.
Specifically, the company is arguing that La Liga and Telefónica have repeatedly failed to take responsibility for overblocking and its impact on legitimate users.
Like Spain, Italy’s “Piracy Shield” system has also faced criticism for major overblocking incidents, but Starzak notes a key difference: Italian authorities were at least willing to roll back faulty blocks once they were identified.
VPN providers are the next target
Beyond the risk of overblocking, IP filtering is often less effective than more targeted measures. This is because pirate streaming sites frequently use “IP hopping” — rerouting traffic across multiple addresses to stay one step ahead of the blocks.
La Liga admits to successfully blocking only about 60% of pirated sites. Proton VPN’s Peterson says this shows “the game of whack-a-mole they’re playing is not particularly good.” Rights holders, however, argue that this inefficiency is driven by VPN usage.
Having already targeted the CDN giant Cloudflare, La Liga and Telefónica have now turned their sights on VPN providers. On February 17, 2026, La Liga announced a legal victory in a Córdoba court against both Proton VPN and NordVPN.
The ruling classifies VPN services as “technological intermediaries” that facilitate copyright infringement. This means VPN companies must actively block access to specific IP addresses during match times.
While Proton hasn’t received any details yet, Peterson told TechRadar that the request is “simply unworkable” because of the way CDNs work with the many-to-many relationship between IPs and websites — regardless of VPNs. He added that if the company were asked to “vandalize the internet” by blocking legitimate sites, it would “obviously contest that.”
“I should make it clear: Proton is not trying to enable piracy. Rights holders have the right to defend their rights. What we don’t believe that they have the right to do is cause such huge collateral damage,” Peterson said. “And IP blocking has already been proven to do substantially more harm than good.”
As La Liga continues to raise the stakes, it remains to be seen whether VPNs will become the next casualty of Spain’s anti-piracy war. For now, a high-quality VPN remains the most reliable way for Spanish residents to bypass the weekend disruptions that have become a routine part of people’s lives.
We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone using a VPN service to break the law or conduct illegal activities. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.
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