Spain's piracy block cut off legitimate internet services
Originally posted on LinkedIn, April 18, 2025.
Spain blocked itself off from the internet. That is not a typo.
To prevent people from watching pirated football streams, Spanish internet service providers blocked Cloudflare. Cloudflare now handles about a quarter of all internet traffic, including major sites that need high availability and fast response times at scale.
Instead of blocking a specific site, domain, or IP address, the providers blocked entire Cloudflare servers. To stop a few questionable links, they cut millions of people off from half the internet.
A few thousand people watching a La Liga match illegally became the reason to block access to thousands of legitimate sites and services, including Discord, blogs, forums, B2B services, and internal dashboards.
This can be described as "temporary collateral damage." In practice, I see it as a clear example of a deeper problem: how easy it is to apply aggressive force to network infrastructure with the push of a button, without transparency, regulation, or real accountability for the result.
The internet is now infrastructure for humanity, just like tap water, electricity, and roads. Unlike those other systems, it remains much easier to disrupt or block it in service of state interests.
Responsibility is contested between content providers, internet service providers, and authorities. Technical complexity has always exposed the limits of bureaucracy. Anyone who remembers Facebook's hearings before the US Congress has seen this dynamic before.
