- Proton VPN usage continues to increase in Spain over the weekend
- The trend coincides with anti-piracy blocks affecting Cloudflare
- Proton VPN is now 75% off for Black Friday
Cloudflare’s IP blocking continues to ruin weekend internet usage in Spain, and LaLiga football is to blame.
This comes as Internet service providers (ISPs) come under increasing pressure to block the illegal broadcast of televised football matches, at the request of Spanish sports streaming giants LaLiga and Telefónica. Local ISPs have been blocking domains hosting pirated sports streams since February.
However, the fight against illegal football streaming has also led to many false positives, with incidents where legitimate domains have become inaccessible, a frustrating trend that leading CDN and DNS provider, Cloudflare hopes to resolve it in court.
Meanwhile, the Spanish have taken matters into their own hands. In October, Proton VPN saw a dramatic 2,500% increase in new subscriptions from the Iberian Peninsula.
“This has happened almost every weekend in 2025, like clockwork, always starting at approximately the same time, every time Spanish football is televised,” the VPN firm confirmed in a tweet.
This is because Proton offers one of the most secure and reliable free VPN services on the market right now, which people in Spain can use as a quick solution. However, Proton VPN Free has limitations, including a lack of streaming support and server choice.
This means that users must upgrade to get the full product and ensure they avoid 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 left to subscribe to Proton VPN premium plans saving up to 75% off their usual price.
How a VPN can help you during internet shutdowns
However, there is another important component of 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 their international VPN servers, instantly giving them a new IP address from 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 at approximately the same time, every time 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 score a first legal victory against VPNs in 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 going after VPNs, with Portugal and Belgium also exploring similar anti-piracy tactics at the time of writing.
While Spain has not yet extended the fight against pirated content to VPN providers, this may change in the future.
For now, at least, Proton VPN (and any other reliable VPN service) remains a crucial piece of technology to have in your bag to prevent your weekend browsing from being ruined once again by new restrictions.
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