Every LaLiga match weekend, Spanish Internet providers must block hundreds of IP addresses that are linked to pirate football streams.
These blocks are the result of a December 2024 court order, obtained by LaLiga and Telefónica Audiovisual Digital, which broadcasts these matches on Movistar Plus+. The order targets Spain’s largest ISPs, including Telefónica’s own.
LaLiga is pleased with the blocking measures and said that they work as intended. However, they are not without controversy, as IP address blocks previously hit broader infrastructure including shared Cloudflare servers. On Saturday, this collateral damage landed in Telefónica’s own backyard.
Movistar Blocks Movistar
On Saturday evening, Movistar’s official forum became unreachable through several Spanish ISPs.
This Comunidad Movistar forum is where the ISP’s customers go for help with their routers, Movistar Plus+ programming, or to report outages. Shortly after 22:00, this support community became unreachable.
According to RedesZone, X user Alvaro Canteiro was the first to notice. At 22:17, he posted that LaLiga appeared to have blocked Movistar’s official forum, presumably as a side effect of its anti-piracy blocking.
Those who tried to visit the forum through rival ISP DIGI saw a blocking notice. It explained that the IP address was blocked under the December 18, 2024 ruling of the Commercial Court No. 6 in Barcelona, requested by LaLiga and Telefónica Audiovisual Digital.
DIGI wasn’t alone. Bandaancha reports that Telefónica routed the forum’s IP address into a black hole, leaving visitors in the dark, without any response at all.
Based on data from blocking tracker HayAhoraFútbol, RedesZone reports that all operators blocked the two Cloudflare IP addresses the forum used at the time. That included Movistar, which effectively blocked access to its own community.
Blocked Cloudflare IP addresses are nothing new in Spain. LaLiga started targeting them in February 2025, and site owners have complained about collateral damage on match days ever since.
‘Focused, Precise’
Under the court order, LaLiga identifies IP addresses that it associates with pirate streams, which ISPs are then required to block. This order is dynamic, allowing LaLiga and Telefónica to add new successor IP addresses based on their own assessment.
These blocks typically start shortly before a match starts and are removed again after the broadcast ends.
Why the forum’s IP addresses ended up on the blocklist is unknown. Neither LaLiga nor Movistar has confirmed the cause of the outage.
LaLiga has consistently defended this blocking approach. The league previously told TorrentFreak that its blocks are backed by judicial resolutions and are not indiscriminate. Third parties who believe they are affected can report this through a dedicated complaints mailbox, LaLiga clarified.
Forum Moves to CloudFront
By Sunday, the forum had moved to a different CDN. Both Bandaancha and RedesZone noticed that the domain no longer pointed to Cloudflare, but was linked to Amazon’s CloudFront instead.
A DNS lookup by TorrentFreak today shows that comunidad.movistar.es now points to movistar.lithium.com, which is indeed served through CloudFront. Who made the switch, and whether it was a direct response to the blocking, is not known.
Whether affected Movistar users will complain about the apparent overblocking has yet to be seen.
Last year, LaLiga told TorrentFreak that it hadn’t received any formal complaints, while stressing that the blocking system was “focused, precise, and without collateral impact on legitimate services.”
