LaLiga / Movistar IP address blocks

Website, Application, Performance DNS & Network
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What is the issue you’re encountering

Since 2nd Feb 2025 LaLiga / Movistar have been regularly blocking Cloudflare IP Addresses

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

I have written to LaLiga explaining that IP address blocks are indiscriminate and block many customers reaching the websites of normal business including ours. Their response is below.

What other options do we have, short of migrating away from Cloudflare to resolve this issue? Our business has a big client base in Spain and we have many first hand reports of customers not being able to reach our website.

La Liga Response:

We appreciate you reaching out to us regarding your concerns about the situation you are facing. However, we must clarify that the blocked IPs belong to a third party, Cloudflare, which is acting as a digital shield for a number of websites engaged in illicit activities. They bear the direct responsibility for the situation you are experiencing, and therefore, any claims should be directed to them, as they are the ones allowing this issue to persist.

It is important to note that Cloudflare has been repeatedly flagged for providing protection to platforms involved in illegal activities. Their complacent stance in permitting the operation of such sites demonstrates a serious lack of action against criminal activities, further exacerbating the problem.

We understand your frustration, but we must emphasize that any concerns related to the blocking of these IPs should be addressed immediately and directly to Cloudflare. Rather than curbing these illegal activities, they continue to facilitate and perpetuate them without any effective intervention. We believe it is essential to implement cybersecurity measures to effectively protect your services. At the same time, we acknowledge that there are various solutions available in the market that can be tailored to different security needs and protection strategies.

We appreciate your communication once again and trust that you will be able to resolve this issue promptly and effectively with Cloudflare’s cooperation, as they are solely responsible for the protection and maintenance of these compromised networks.

What feature, service or problem is this related to?

I don’t know

What are the steps to reproduce the issue?

The legal case between LaLiga and Cloudflare is well documented:

Unfortunately it looks like the courts support the use of IP address blocks:

Ironically this has even affected the websites of some teams who play in La Liga

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Your only options are to use “DNS only” and not use the proxy, or use Cloudflare with IP addresses dedicated to you which requires an Enterprise plan.

3

Thanks for getting back to me @sjr :slight_smile:

This is obviously a huge shame!

Seeing as the Business plan is $200 / month, the custom priced Enterprise plan is likely to be significantly more. So this is not a valid option for the vast majority of the hundreds if not thousands of websites that will have been affected by LaLiga’s blocks.

Again for the vast majority of websites turning off CDN caching defeats the primary purpose of using Cloudflare.

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