For many, the recent Cloudflare outage was the latest in a series of increasingly frequent reminders about the fragility of the internet. For internet users in Spain, however, it’s an all too familiar experience. Almost every weekend, all sites running on Cloudflare are effectively inaccessible if a soccer match is being played. The reason? Piracy.

In late 2024, a court in Barcelona granted Spain's top-flight soccer league La Liga an order allowing it to request Spanish ISPs to block any IP addresses it identifies as involved in pirating matches.

That order was considerably broad, effectively allowing it to request ISPs to block sites without needing a fresh court review for each IP. This provides the league with the legal basis to ask ISPs to block any addresses it wants, rather than just specific pirate sites.

The target of those blocks would end up being sites running through Cloudflare, with La Liga claiming that more than 50% of pirate IPs illegally distributing matches used Cloudflare.

In February 2025, La Liga received its first major blocking order to take place during matchdays. The result? Internet users across Spain saw most sites that used Cloudflare become unreachable while games were being played.

In a statement at the time, La Liga went on the offensive, claiming Cloudflare “knowingly protects criminal organizations for profit,” while also accusing it of enabling more serious illegal activities, including “human trafficking, prostitution, pornography, [and] counterfeiting.”

Cloudflare sought to appeal La Liga’s measure, arguing it was disproportionate and caused massive collateral damage by blocking millions of legitimate users.​ That appeal was rejected in March, and the blocking continued until the La Liga season ended in May.

Upon the season restarting in August, reports of the matchday blocking resurfaced – with the potential for mass blockings to occur until this season again ends in the summer of 2026.

The repeated outages have seen internet users in Spain turn to virtual private networks (VPNs) to access legitimate services. According to Proton VPN, demand for its services soared as high as 200% last month alone as Spanish users are unable to access services using traditional providers like Movistar, Orange, and Vodafone during matchday blackouts.

Cloudflare isn’t the only target of La Liga’s ire, with the league also having gone after Vercel.

In a blog post penned back in April, Vercel CTO Malte Ubl and principal engineer Matheus Fernandes wrote: “What started as an anti-piracy measure has become an unaccountable form of internet censorship. There’s no distinction between targeted enforcement and mass collateral damage. IPs are being blocklisted wholesale.”

Vercel has since said it’s “working closely” with La Liga to remove illegal streaming content from its platform.

But the spat between Cloudflare and La Liga appears to be rumbling on. Despite its failed appeal attempt, Cloudflare hasn’t softened its stance.

Things could escalate further, however, with the Spanish football league actively lobbying the European Commission for stronger, binding EU‑level rules that would make aggressive blocking obligations more standard across member states.

According to a La Liga statement published last weekend, the European Commission concluded that the number of reported incidents involving the blocking of legitimate content has been “minimal in comparison to the total number of dynamic blocking measures.”

“While the European Commission continues to assess the need to expand current measures and address the reluctance of certain intermediaries, such as Cloudflare, to cooperate with rightsholders, La Liga reiterates its willingness to collaborate with the relevant authorities and stakeholders,” the statement reads. “The goal is to move toward genuine, effective, real-time, cross-border cooperation that protects the value of live sports and audiovisual content.”

SDxCentral has contacted Cloudflare for comment.