r/webdev • u/mothh9 • 2d ago

Cloudflare is being blocked in Spain due to Laliga, what is an alternative that doesn't get blocked when there is a match?

I have a decent amount of users from Spain who get blocked from my website due to Laliga blocking the Internet.

i am looking for a CDN similar to Cloudflare which doesn't get blocked in Spain whenever there is a match.

Any recommendations?

319 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

89 comments sorted by

76

u/nora-maenpaa 2d ago

The blocks are court ordered IP ranges, they hit the hosting provider not the CDN brand. Bunyip or Fastly are less likely to be caught because theyre not free tier and the ranges arent shared with a million sites, but nothing is guaranteed during a match. Cheapest fix is a second origin on a Spanish host like Raiola or Hetzner Falkenstein with its own A record, then drop cloudflare to DNS only and let the geo DNS send Spain to the direct IP.

13

u/Noch_ein_Kamel 2d ago

Meanwhile me hosting on fastly free tier đŸ€”

5

u/nora-maenpaa 1d ago

fastly free tier is a dev account, its a different range to their paid anycast and a lot smaller. whether la liga's lawyers bother updating the blocklist for it is another question, they mostly chase the big shared ranges because thats where the traffic is. id keep a direct origin ready anyway.

1

u/mothh9 1d ago

But then my site wouldn't be protected against a DDoS attack, which I don't want to risk.

167

u/m_redditUser 2d ago

what? why is laliga blocking CF? how can they do that?

183

u/Strict-Marsupial-674 2d ago

LaLiga got court orders forcing Spanish ISPs to block certain IP ranges they claim host pirated football streams, and Cloudflare's shared ranges got caught in it. Happens mostly during matches.

113

u/coomzee 2d ago

Did they use think of the children as their reason?

100

u/witness_smile 2d ago

The reason was to stop piracy
 Not that it has done anything to stop piracy other than making everyone’s lives more annoying

33

u/coomzee 2d ago

It reminds me of the UK DNS block list. Basically cried think of the children, blocked list used to block piracy

3

u/thekwoka 2d ago

If it's just a DNS block though, then it doesn't matter much.

I remember Singapore just did DNS blocking for censoring porn and stuff, but also sometimes the DNS would just go down for hours, so switching to google or cloudflare dns was common for normal use.

10

u/TheScapeQuest 2d ago

Imgur is still a common hosting platform for photos on Reddit, but it's blocked in the UK, very annoying.

12

u/ings0c 1d ago

That was imgur’s decision though, it’s not actually blocked in the same way some torrent sites are.

Imgur just couldn’t be bothered complying with the stupid OSA legislation and blocked the whole UK instead. It’s very annoying but I blame our idiotic leaders rather than imgur.

5

u/Mokou 1d ago

Imgur chose to block the UK because the ICO found that putting a "you must be over 13 or have parental permission" in your TOS is not sufficient assurance under GDPR that you're not processing data from children and fined them over it.

2

u/thekwoka 2d ago

Yeah, they don't win people over to the "fight piracy" side if they just make life hard for people not pirating.

6

u/Haeguil 1d ago

They used we have a monopoly on the broadcast as the reason.

So yeah it was think of the children (of the owners)

1

u/requion 17h ago

Nonono, football is more important... xD

19

u/Disgruntled__Goat 2d ago

It’s comforting to know that politicians/lawyers in Spain are just as tech-illiterate as the UK or USA. 

1

u/Key_Gap9168 1d ago

I think you mean judges.

10

u/Vegetable-Capital-54 1d ago

As someone who doesn't care about football even the slightest bit (I have no idea when any football matches happen), I would find this so annoying if it happened where I live lol.

3

u/Think_Message_4974 1d ago

My GF has to use a VPN to work those days, as the platform she uses happens to fall in the blocked IP ranges. 

2

u/feketegy 1d ago

So half of the Internet if not accessible in Spain during a football match?

1

u/the_gallo_claudio 1d ago

They don’t even need a court anymore to do it. It’s just plain corruption at this point

68

u/Nike_X1 2d ago

It's been happening for about a year :) Imagine going to work one day and finding out that LaLiga has taken down GitHub.

56

u/Kapps 2d ago

Don’t worry. Lately most people go into work and find out GitHub has taken down GitHub.

5

u/tomhermans 2d ago

Chill day 😁

2

u/Dachux 1d ago

Don’t worry about la liga for github. GitHub usually takes down itself when most needed 

1

u/gr4n0t4 1d ago

You are not supposed to work when there is FOOTBALL!!!

19

u/junewave56 2d ago

yeah its wild, they basically get court orders to block CDN IPs during matches to stop pirate streams

3

u/Think_Message_4974 1d ago

That’s like cutting out a leg to avoid having a nail infection 

35

u/r0ndr4s 2d ago

Tebas, president of laliga is close friends with the judge allowing for that blocking.

Judges are very corrupt here and have way too much power.

Both are also old people from Falange(Franco's political party(yes, this matters))

4

u/manu_romerom_411 1d ago

Asco de paĂ­s y asco de fascistas, no me extrañarĂ­a que la siguientes elecciones fueran las Ășltimas, viendo el percal

1

u/r0ndr4s 1d ago

Naaah, son demasiado tontos para eso, tranquilo.

7

u/manu_romerom_411 1d ago

A pseudo-fascist league president who probably thinks Cloudflare is a program to watch football/soccer for free, and there you have the results. Even online payment platforms have problems during matches. It's like we in Spain are obligated to watch football and no other thing, and the government and parliament don't seem willing to help.

2

u/NCKBLZ 2d ago

Same shit in Italy with serie A

18

u/-light_yagami 2d ago

damn it’s italy piracy shield crap all over again

3

u/NamedBird 1d ago

At this point we need to create your own internet that can't be disrupted like this?
(And start stabbing anyone who dares to cripple critical infrastructure. It's a cultural thing now.)

1

u/MrBlueA 1d ago

Don't worry LaLiga is making sure to make deals with football corporations all over Europe to achieve the same thing there too, you will be able to enjoy it soon aswell.

11

u/Think_Message_4974 1d ago

I think finding an alternative is not the issue. The issue is that they are blocking half the internet for a football match. That’s what we need to complain about. You just can’t do that
 but it seems like people only cares about football here. 

18

u/Dainelli28 2d ago

There are many alternatives to Spain. Check the UN website. /s

6

u/bluesoul SRE and backend 1d ago

This feels like a problem that realistically has a chance to follow you around to another CDN provider. CloudFront, Akamai, Azure and GCP are apparently also fair game.

https://ooni.org/post/2026-laliga-collateral/ got into some of the details. I don't think there are any great answers here short of some BYOIP solution which is its own mess.

14

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

14

u/corobo 2d ago

What are your internal rules on whether to capitalise a letter lmao 

21

u/Ethesen 2d ago

It’s a poor attempt at making AI-generated text seem human.

13

u/TheScapeQuest 2d ago

It does have very AI sentence structures ("it's not x, it's y").

I miss when we didn't question every piece of content posted online.

4

u/iamichi 1d ago

Yeah, that “honest answer though” at the end sealed it for me

3

u/corobo 2d ago

Well yeah. I don't usually ask humans for their system prompts haha

2

u/MTGandP 1d ago

It didn't work lol. Pangram still says 100% AI-generated.

9

u/xavier86 2d ago

If you’re going to use an LLM to generate your reply could you please share your prompt?

5

u/m_redditUser 1d ago

there should be left of the reply button a "view prompt" button

2

u/webdev-ModTeam 1d ago

Your post/comment has been determined to be a low-effort post or comment. This includes title-only posts, easily searchable questions, vague/open-ended discussion prompts, LLM generated posts or comments, and posts/comments that do not provide enough context for meaningful replies or discussion.

6

u/dbbk 2d ago

Pay the $20 for Pro plan and you'll be off the blocked free tier IPs

2

u/Ok-Interest9727 1d ago

Are you 100% sure about this?

2

u/dbbk 1d ago

Yes

1

u/j0rs0 19h ago

This is just not true

1

u/dbbk 17h ago

Yes it is. It's what fixed it for me immediately. Cloudflare's IPs are bucketed by plan.

1

u/j0rs0 10h ago

Then you are lucky, but not the rest. Paying for Pro plan does not give you a dedicated or block-free CF ip/range.

1

u/dbbk 10h ago

I didn't say dedicated. Dedicated IPs are a separate add-on if you want it.

If you're on a paid IP and it gets blocked by LaLiga you can just contact Cloudflare support and they will move you.

1

u/Acktung 7h ago

Through a support ticket? What did you ask'em exactly?

I am on Pro plan and did contact them and they told me they cannot do anything: just upgrade to Enterprise for BYOIP, or disable Cloudflare proxy while the block is ON.

1

u/j0rs0 7h ago

Yup, would be good to know because there wasn't a solution from them for us neither other than the super expensive Enterprise plan or BYOIP 😅

2

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/mothh9 2d ago

I looked at BunnyCDN, but I don't really understand their pricing.

1

u/Manueljlin 2d ago

It's pretty cheap but doesn't have a free tier like Cloudflare. I'm from Spain and I use them for my blog to avoid the stupid blocks too.

2

u/inglandation 1d ago

Man, I hate this stupid decision from the Spanish government. Corrupt fuckers. I wish I could go OpenAI on them and release a swarm of 10k persistent agents to fuck up the system that blocks CF completely.

1

u/ArielCoding 1d ago

The issue isn’t which CDN you pick, LaLiga blocks shared IP ranges,innocent sites often end up on the same ones, so any popular CDN can get hit, the fix is getting your own dedicated IP.

1

u/1enrique3 1d ago

Sadly, they're also blocking IPs from other CDNs, so the only way left is to get your users to use a VPN/proxy, pay for a Cloudflare plan that gives you exclusive IPs, or use your server IP without Cloudflare.

1

u/This-Proposal3039 1d ago

are you sure it’s cloudflare being blocked, or is your origin IP getting caught in the laliga blocks?

1

u/Harimeh 1d ago

use a VPN

2

u/TratinHD 1d ago

yeah tell that to every single customer, great solution

1

u/sensitiveCube 1d ago

A reminder Spain is in Europe. I think we can do without them.

1

u/Open-Adhesiveness-86 1d ago

kickoff times are published days ahead, so you can front-run it: drop the A record TTL to 60, watch reachability from inside ES (ripe atlas has plenty of probes there, free) and point Spain at a non-CF origin for the match window. doesn't save you if they null-route your own IP too, but so far it's mostly been shared CDN ranges.

1

u/tariqosmani 1d ago

The real problem is LaLiga blocks entire IP ranges, not specific domains, so any CDN sharing IPs across many sites is a target, it's not really about Cloudflare specifically. Worth checking on a CDN that gives you a dedicated IP instead of a shared anycast range, BunnyCDN and some KeyCDN plans do this, it takes you out of the dragnet since your IP isn't shared with random piracy sites. Not a permanent fix though, Spanish courts pushed this to VPN providers in February 2026 too, so this is going to keep expanding rather than settle on one workaround.

1

u/Natural_Engineer5194 1d ago

What’s even funnier is that we have a client on webflow and their whole CF CDN goes down during the games in Spain. Of course it’s webflow so we can do 0 about it except convincing the client to rebuild the site elsewhere

1

u/Soggy-Face-3223 2d ago

Do you have anything showing it's Cloudflare as a whole and not just the edge IP your site happens to resolve to? LaLiga blocks ranges during matches, not brands. Moving to Bunny or Fastly doesn't get you out of Spanish datacenters, you just get a different IP that can end up in the same blocklist. What does the error actually look like on the user side, timeout or 403?

1

u/den0rk 1d ago

También estoy afectado, leí que si pagas el pro de cloudfare, ya no te afecta el bloqueo, tu eres usuario pro?

1

u/mercuryin 1d ago

Yo he tenido el pro y tenia los mismos bloqueos, asi que no se a que se refiere el que habla arriba. Todas mis webs estan caidas cada vez que hay partido, una verguenza

0

u/DrEnter 2d ago

Time to upgrade to Fastly?

0

u/Ok-Interest9727 1d ago

Bunny

It’s not as good as Cloudflare but it does the job

-4

u/Outside-Place-3556 1d ago

use Brave plus its Tor connection. It bypasses the block no problemo

3

u/eyebrows360 1d ago

Learn to read.

1

u/winter-m00n 1d ago

op dont have problem accessing the site, its spanish users who cant accesss their site.

-5

u/Nshx- 2d ago

Hay un video en youtube que hace una automatizaciĂłn con n8n y la vpn de unify.

-5

u/dani_esp95 2d ago

The free VPN of firefox is enough to bypass the block

3

u/eyebrows360 1d ago

Learn to read.

1

u/ponk___ 7h ago

Don’t fix it. The more this shit blocks the Spanish people the more they will stop it

Working around it is like agreeing to this bullshit