My website disappears when there is football

Dima · October 2026

On Sunday 11 October 2026, at 14:49, a page of mine stopped loading from my home. It is the documentation for a personal tool. It has no ads, no video and nothing to do with football.

The page was fine. What failed was the route: my internet provider had stopped delivering traffic to the two IP addresses the page happened to be on that day, because someone had put them on a blocklist to protect the broadcast of a match.

1. What I measured

The page is on Cloudflare, behind IP addresses it shares with many other websites. This is what I saw in that minute:

My provider’s DNS and Google’s (8.8.8.8) resolved the domain to 188.114.96.5 and 188.114.97.5. Both connections timed out.
Cloudflare’s DNS (1.1.1.1) resolved the same domain to 172.66.44.52. Forcing that address, the page answered with a 200 in 0.18 seconds.
Another site of mine, unrelated to the first, also failed when forced through 188.114.96.5. The fault was in the address, not in the site.

Fig. 1 — The same page, the same minute, three addresses. Measured from my home connection on Sunday 11 October 2026 at 14:49. The page was being served from all three Cloudflare addresses. The two that my provider’s DNS and Google’s returned did not answer from my provider’s network; the one Cloudflare’s own DNS returned answered in 0.18 seconds.

There is a public monitor, hayahora.futbol, run by a group of engineers who measure the blocks from home connections. Its data for that day says the same: both addresses were blocked between 13:41 and 14:09 on four of the five large Spanish providers, and at 14:49 there were 103 addresses blocked, 95 of them Cloudflare’s. The day before, a Saturday, the same two had been blocked from shortly after 16:00 until after 23:20.

It was not a one-day accident. According to the same data, since the season began on 15 August there has been some blocking on 31 of 58 days, and those two addresses have been blocked about twenty times each.

2. Why an unrelated site goes down

A content delivery network such as Cloudflare serves hundreds of thousands of websites from a small number of IP addresses. That is what makes it cheap and fast. It also means an IP address does not identify a website: it identifies a whole building.

Blocking an IP to take down a pirate stream is sealing the building because someone in one flat is causing trouble.

OONI, an independent project that measures internet censorship, put numbers on it for the first half of 2026. Of 9.2 million domains analysed, 554,507 were affected at some point during matches. It identified 7,441 blocked addresses from 36 providers, including Amazon, Akamai, Microsoft and Meta. Cloudflare accounted for 30% of the addresses and 90.4% of the affected domains. And blocking between 4 and 20 addresses in one hour was enough to make more than 400,000 domains unreachable.

Among the affected sites OONI names are chapters of Amnesty International, Greenpeace Argentina, the Australian Senate and Linux Mint.

3. Where it comes from

From a court ruling: judgment 310/2024 of 18 December 2024, by Commercial Court No. 6 of Barcelona, at the request of LaLiga and Telefónica Audiovisual Digital. The providers that were sued did not contest it, so there was no technical debate. The infrastructure companies affected were not parties.

The ruling lets LaLiga send providers lists of addresses that are updated every matchday, without a new court order for each one. It covers three seasons and expires in June 2027. Cloudflare and RootedCON asked for it to be annulled and the court refused in March 2025; both have appealed to the Constitutional Court, which has published no decision.

It no longer happens only at weekends. Euronews documented blocks on Tuesday 15 and Wednesday 16 September, lasting three to six hours, that broke model downloads from Hugging Face and Ollama.

4. What LaLiga says

It deserves to be told in its own words. LaLiga maintains that the blocks are “proportional, surgical and limited in time”, that they only target addresses used to broadcast without permission, and that the party responsible for the damage is Cloudflare, for serving those streams. In its statement of February 2025 it acknowledged that legal businesses had been affected. It also says that no owner of a blocked domain has proven any harm.

Piracy of its matches is a real problem and it has every right to pursue it. The problem is the method.

5. Why it is unacceptable

Nobody reviewed the address I happened to be on. Nobody told me. There is no official list where you can check what is blocked: the only one that exists is kept by volunteers. There is no channel to ask to be unblocked while the match is on, which is when it matters.

The party deciding which parts of the internet can be reached in Spain during those hours is a private body with a commercial interest in the outcome, and it decides in real time.

When the affected were raised in parliament, the Ministry of Culture answered that it had received no formal complaint and that anyone who felt harmed should go to court. In other words: to get back a few hours of service for a small website, you have to sue a football league.

My case is a documentation page; I lost no money. Others did. A seller told elDiario.es that he sold more units than he had because his server could not talk to the marketplaces he sells on. The payment gateway Redsys has failed during matches. And OONI also found one provider intercepting encrypted connections with a forged certificate, which is no longer a block but something else.

6. What you can do if you are just browsing

Check that this is it. Look at hayahora.futbol. If there is a match on and the site loads over mobile data from another provider or over a VPN, it is the block.
Go around it. A VPN avoids it. Cloudflare’s WARP is free; iCloud Private Relay works for Safari if you have iCloud+.
Do not rely on changing DNS. The block is by IP address, not by name. That day Cloudflare’s DNS gave me an address that was not blocked, but that was luck: it depends on which address you are handed.
Leave a record. The OONI Probe app records the measurement in a form others can use as evidence.

7. What you can do if the site is yours

You cannot choose which address Cloudflare puts you on, and changing plan does not guarantee anything. What is in your hands:

Find out. The list of blocked addresses is public. This checks whether any of yours is on it right now:

curl -fsS https://hayahora.futbol/estado/blocked-any.txt > /tmp/blocked.txt
for dns in 1.1.1.1 8.8.8.8; do
  for ip in $(dig +short A example.com @$dns); do
    grep -qxF "$ip" /tmp/blocked.txt && echo "$ip (via $dns): blocked now"
  done
done

It asks two resolvers because, as happened to me, each can return different addresses. Run it from cron every ten minutes and you know when it starts and when it ends.

Have a second door. Whatever must not go down (a payment, a login, a notice to customers) should have a second name that resolves to an address that is not shared: a small server with its own IP, or a different provider. It is neither free nor convenient, and it is still cheaper than a Saturday without sales.

Tell your users. One line on the status page or on social media: “if it does not load and there is a match on, it is not us”. It cuts support requests and explains the problem to people who did not know it existed.

Keep evidence and add your case. Date, time, provider, IP address and consequence. The Spanish Startup Association collects cases, and RootedCON and HackBCN offer technical and legal support. It matters, because the official argument is that there are no complaints.

8. What would have to change

Pursuing an illegal stream does not require blocking shared addresses. There are concrete alternatives:

Block the name, not the building. An order addressed to the provider serving the stream, with a deadline of minutes, removes that domain and leaves everyone else alone.
A measurable proportionality limit. No address serving more than a small number of unrelated domains should be blockable. There is precedent: hayahora.futbol cites a 2023 case in which a court limited IP blocks to the dedicated servers of one platform and used DNS for the rest.
Transparency. An official, public list of what is blocked, when and on whose order. Today volunteers do that work.
An unblocking channel that works during the match, and liability for damages when the block reaches someone it should not.
Someone independent reviewing the list. Today the addresses are chosen by the interested party.

The Economy Committee of the Spanish Congress approved a non-binding motion in that direction on 29 April 2026, with PP and Vox voting against. It changes no law by itself.

9. Signatures and complaints

I looked for a petition. There is one on Change.org, opened on 23 March 2026 and addressed to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation. On the day I write this it has 22 signatures. With half a million domains affected, that number says almost nobody knows why a website will not load on a Saturday afternoon.

What carries most weight today is not signatures but formal complaints. The Asociación de Internautas, the Asociación de Usuarios de Internet and Fundación España Digital took the case to the Ombudsman and to the European Commission. An independent registry lists 266 documented incidents.

If it has happened to you, sign, but above all document your case and register it. As long as the official answer is that nobody has complained, every case with a date, a time and an IP address is what disproves it.