LaLiga's piracy blocks: how a minor Spanish match takes down the internet
LaLiga's anti-piracy IP blocks in Spain have knocked out the RAE website, Redsys payments and Twitch during minor matches, hitting people who never pirate anything.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
An Osasuna-Levante leaves Spain without AI tools, card payments and the RAE
An Osasuna-Levante kicks off and AI video generation tools stop responding. It is not bad luck or a one-off glitch. It is the same pattern that repeats every time a Spanish league match starts: a bundle of digital services with no connection to football go down or stutter, and the culprit is not a cyberattack but the barrage of IP address blocks activated against piracy. It makes no difference whether the game is a clásico or a relegation battle. The switch gets flipped all the same.
What gets blocked and why a clothing store goes down
The mechanism explains what looks inexplicable at first glance. Much of the online world runs its firewalls through providers that share them among thousands of customers under the same address range. When a block targets a specific IP, it cannot tell the pirate site from the shop living two doors down. That is why, according to published reports, the outages have hit the RAE website, payment platforms like Redsys —to the point of blocking card payments at stores like Zara during an Alavés-Elche match—, live streaming services and mobility or health apps.
A three-year authorization and an audience that does not exist
As of this discussion, the measure operated under a court authorization that, in practice, extends for three years and allows action on traffic without requiring a high-profile match. Information about what is blocked at any given moment circulates through citizen-run repositories trying to track it in real time. The result, according to documented cases, is that the most common technical workaround is a VPN —including Cloudflare's—, exactly the same tool used to watch pirated football. The paradox needs little unpacking: squeezing the pirate pushes the fan toward the VPN.
A 0-0 that takes down AI across half of Spain
The numbers do not add up either. While a Barça match draws around one million legal viewers, minor fixtures do not reach 100,000. The latest chapter came courtesy of a Málaga-Levante that ended 0-0 with seven yellow cards —fifteen, it is said, would have been deserved—, with 29,264 people at La Rosaleda. That is the match capable of leaving half of Spain without AI video generation.
An Osasuna-Levante kicks off and AI video generation tools stop responding. It is not bad luck or a one-off glitch. It is the same pattern that repeats every time a Spanish league match starts: a bundle of digital services with no connection to football go down or stutter, and the culprit is not a cyberattack but the barrage of IP address blocks activated against piracy. It makes no difference whether the game is a clásico or a relegation battle. The switch gets flipped all the same.
What gets blocked and why a clothing store goes down
The mechanism explains what looks inexplicable at first glance. Much of the online world runs its firewalls through providers that share them among thousands of customers under the same address range. When a block targets a specific IP, it cannot tell the pirate site from the shop living two doors down. That is why, according to published reports, the outages have hit the RAE website, payment platforms like Redsys —to the point of blocking card payments at stores like Zara during an Alavés-Elche match—, live streaming services and mobility or health apps.
A three-year authorization and an audience that does not exist
As of this discussion, the measure operated under a court authorization that, in practice, extends for three years and allows action on traffic without requiring a high-profile match. Information about what is blocked at any given moment circulates through citizen-run repositories trying to track it in real time. The result, according to documented cases, is that the most common technical workaround is a VPN —including Cloudflare's—, exactly the same tool used to watch pirated football. The paradox needs little unpacking: squeezing the pirate pushes the fan toward the VPN.
A 0-0 that takes down AI across half of Spain
The numbers do not add up either. While a Barça match draws around one million legal viewers, minor fixtures do not reach 100,000. The latest chapter came courtesy of a Málaga-Levante that ended 0-0 with seven yellow cards —fifteen, it is said, would have been deserved—, with 29,264 people at La Rosaleda. That is the match capable of leaving half of Spain without AI video generation.
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (17 replies).
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