- 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 wreak havoc on weekend internet usage in Spain – and LaLiga football is to blame.
This comes as internet service providers (ISPs) come under increasing pressure to block illegal streaming 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.
Yet the fight against illegal football streaming has also led to many false positives with incidents of legitimate domains becoming unavailable – a frustrating trend as the leading CDN and DNS provider, Cloudflare, hopes to correct in court.
Meanwhile, the Spanish have taken matters into their own hands. In October, Proton VPN recorded a dramatic 2,500% increase in new sign-ups from the Iberian Peninsula.
“This has happened almost every weekend in 2025, like clockwork, always starting around the same time Spanish football is televised,” the VPN company confirmed in a tweet.
That’s because Proton offers one of the most secure and reliable free VPN services on the market right now that people in Spain can use as a quick fix. However, Proton VPN Free comes with limitations, including the lack of streaming support and server selection.
This means users must upgrade to get the full product and be sure to bypass the limitations they face.
The good news is that Proton is among the top VPNs 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% off its usual pricing.
How a VPN can help you during internet blocks
However, there is another important component to how VPNs work that 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 giving them a new IP address outside of Spain. The ISP is then tricked into thinking that the traffic is coming from a completely different country or location.
Just like last week, Cloudflare is again blocked by Spanish ISPs. This has happened almost every weekend in 2025, like clockwork that always starts around the same time when Spanish football is televised. https://t.co/jRLZysS9wx29 November 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 lawsuit against DNS services last year, Canal+ managed to score a legal-first victory against VPNs back in May when the Paris court ordered five popular VPN providers to block access to over 200 illegal sports sites.
Italy has also started to go after 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, that may change in the future.
For now, Proton VPN (and any trusted VPN service for that matter) is at least a crucial piece of tech to have in your bag to avoid having your weekend browsing ruined by new restrictions again.
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