- Proton VPN usage continues to soar in Spain over the weekend
- Trend coincides with anti-piracy blockages impacting Cloudflare
- Proton VPN is now 75% off for Black Friday
Cloudflare’s IP blocking continues to ruin weekend internet usage in Spain – and La Liga is to blame for football.
It comes as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) come under increasing pressure to block illegal broadcasts of televised soccer matches, at the behest of Spanish sports streaming giants LaLiga and Telefónica. Local ISPs have been blocking domains hosting pirated sports streams since February.
Yet the fight against illegal soccer streaming has also led to numerous false positives with incidents of legitimate domains becoming inaccessible – a frustrating trend that leading CDN and DNS provider, Cloudflare, hopes to fix it in court.
In the meantime, the Spanish took matters into their own hands. In October, Proton VPN saw a dramatic 2,500% increase in new signups from the Iberian Peninsula.
“This has happened almost every weekend in 2025, like clockwork, always starting around the same time, every time Spanish football is televised,” the VPN company confirmed in a tweet.
Indeed, Proton currently offers one of the most secure and reliable free VPN services on the market, which Spaniards can use as a quick solution. Proton VPN Free does have limitations, however, including lack of streaming support and server choices.
This means that users must upgrade to get the full product and ensure they bypass the restrictions they face.
The good news is that Proton is among the best VPNs currently offering Black Friday VPN deals. Customers still have a few days to subscribe to Proton VPN’s premium plans, saving up to 75% compared to its usual price.
How a VPN Can Help You During Internet Blockages
There is, however, another important element to how VPNs work, which is exactly what is needed to bypass these and other types of geo-restrictions online: IP spoofing.
Every time a user connects to the VPN, their internet traffic is redirected through one of its international VPN servers, instantly granting them a new IP address outside of Spain. The ISP is then tricked into believing that the traffic is coming from a completely different country or location.
Like last week, Cloudflare is once again blocked by Spanish ISPs. This has happened almost every weekend in 2025, like clockwork, always starting around the same time, whenever Spanish football is televised. https://t.co/jRLZysS9wxNovember 29, 2025
As VPNs are increasingly used as a tool to bypass anti-piracy blocks, they are also becoming a target for copyright holders in Europe.
In France, for example, after a successful legal action against DNS services last year, Canal+ managed to achieve a first legal victory against VPNs as early as May, when the Paris judicial court ordered five popular VPN providers to block access to more than 200 illegal sports sites.
Italy has also started cracking down on VPNs, with Portugal and Belgium also exploring similar anti-piracy tactics at the time of writing.
Although Spain has not yet extended the fight against pirated content to VPN providers, this could change in the future.
For now, at least, Proton VPN (and any other trusted VPN service for that matter) remains a crucial technology to have in the bag to prevent your weekend browsing from being ruined again by new restrictions.
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