Cloudflare regional block (SPAIN)

Using Ghost
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Here’s a breakdown of what’s happening:

  • The Cause: LaLiga, Spain’s professional football league, and the telecommunications provider Movistar (part of Telefónica) have been implementing measures to combat illegal streaming of football matches.
  • The Method: To stop pirate streams, they have been blocking specific IP addresses that are known to host these “illicit services”.(Tunnels ?)
  • The Problem: Cloudflare, as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and security service, uses shared IP addresses. This means that a single IP address can be used by many different websites, both legal and illegal. By blocking an IP address used by a pirate stream, Movistar and LaLiga are also unintentionally blocking all other legitimate websites that use that same IP address.
  • The Impact: This has led to widespread service disruptions for many businesses and users in Spain, particularly for those on the Movistar network (which also includes O2). Websites using Cloudflare for security and performance have become inaccessible during LaLiga match days. Reports from various sources, including Cloudflare’s own community forums, indicate that this has affected a wide range of sites, from small businesses and institutional websites to platforms like GitHub.
  • The Response: Cloudflare has criticized this approach, calling it “disproportionate.” They have taken legal action against LaLiga, arguing that this method of blocking is illegal because it causes a significant amount of collateral damage to unrelated parties. LaLiga, on the other hand, has accused Cloudflare of “actively enabling illegal activities” and profiting from them.
    In short, the “Cloudflare services break in Spain” is not a technical failure on Cloudflare’s part, but a direct consequence of a legal and technical battle between LaLiga/Movistar and Cloudflare over how to combat online piracy. The current situation is a result of this conflict, with regular users and legitimate websites caught in the middle. PANEUROPEAN PROBLEM?
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There are parallels with how spam has been managed for years.

When an IP address sends too much spam, other mail services would ban that IP address.

That worked fine in the beginning but eventually giant mail providers like Amazon appears that send out mail on behalf of many customers.

If other providers block Amazon’s IPs because of one bad customer, thousands more would be impacted.

This is managed in some different ways. First, Amazon is very strict about sending spam on their platform. As a result, email sent via AWS is fairly clean overall.

Also, Amazon allows customers to rent specific IP addresses for email sending to carefully manage their sending reputation if they want or need to.

For this illegal streaming case, I’m not sure what’s the best solution, but it does highlight how massive services like Cloudflare can become a single point of failure.

If companies used a greater variety of services beside Cloudflare, the impact of blocking Cloudflare would be more limited for everyone.

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