- Proton VPN usage keeps soaring in Spain during the weekend
- The trend coincides with anti-piracy blocks impacting Cloudflare
- Proton VPN is now discounted by 75% for Black Friday
Cloudflare’s IP blocking keeps ruining weekend internet use in Spain – and LaLiga football is to blame.
This comes as internet service providers (ISPs) are increasingly under pressure to block illegal streaming of televised football games, at the request 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 football streaming has also led to many false positives with incidents of legitimate domains becoming inaccessible – a frustrating trend that the leading CDN and DNS provider, Cloudflare, hopes to fix in Court.
In the meantime, Spaniards have taken matters into their own hands. In October, Proton VPN registered a dramatic surge of 2,500% new sign-ups from the Iberian Peninsula.
“This has happened nearly every weekend in 2025, like clockwork, always starting around the same time, whenever Spanish football is televised,” the VPN firm confirmed in a tweet.
That’s 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 fix. Proton VPN Free does comes with limitations, though, including the lack of streaming support and server choice.
This means users need to upgrade to get the full product and be sure to bypass the restrictions they’re facing.
The good news is that Proton is among the best VPN currently offering Black Friday VPN deals. Customers still have a few days left to subscribe to Proton VPN’s premium plans by saving up to 75% from its usual pricing.
How a VPN can help you during internet blocks
A virtual private network (VPN) is a security software mostly known for encrypting user internet connections and boosting their online privacy and security.
There is another important component of how VPNs work, though, which is exactly what’s needed to bypass these and other types of geo-restrictions online: IP-spoofing.
Every time a user connects to the VPN, their internet traffic gets rerouted via one of its international VPN servers, instantly granting them a new IP address from outside of Spain. The ISP is then tricked into thinking that the traffic comes from a completely different country or location.
Just like last week, Cloudflare is once again being blocked by Spanish ISPs. This has happened nearly 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 of copyright holders in Europe.
In France, for example, after a successful legal action against DNS services last year, Canal+ managed to score a legal-first victory against VPNs back in May, when the Paris Judicial Court ordered five popular VPN providers to block access to over 200 illegal sports sites.
Italy has begun going after VPNs, too, with Portugal and Belgium also exploring similar anti-piracy tactics at the time of writing.
While Spain hasn’t yet extended the fight against pirated content to VPN providers, it may change in the future.
For now, at least, Proton VPN (and any other trusted VPN service for that matter) remains a crucial piece of tech to have in the bag to avoid having your weekend browsing ruined by new restrictions yet again.
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chiara.castro@futurenet.com (Chiara Castro)
