Your site won't load from Spain: LaLiga's Cloudflare blocks

Saturday night. A customer messages you: «your website is down». You open it on your phone and it works perfectly. He insists, and he is right: from his house nobody can get in. Not him, and not half of Spain.

If that has happened to you, almost certainly nothing of yours is broken. You have been caught by one of the football blocks.

It is not your website: it is a list of blocked addresses

It has been in the Spanish news for a couple of years now. To shut down pirate match streams, LaLiga obtains court orders and the telecom operators —Movistar, Orange, Vodafone, DIGI— cut off access during football hours.

The problem is how the cut is made. Specific pages are not blocked: entire internet addresses are, and those addresses are not home only to whoever was streaming the match. They are home to thousands of legitimate websites that happen to be hosted in the same place, nearly always behind Cloudflare, a service half the internet uses to run faster and stay protected.

Shops, restaurants, clinics, blogs. People who have done nothing and who, for a few hours, simply vanish from the internet in Spain. There is no warning, nobody to call and no counter to complain at. When the match ends, everything comes back on its own.

Your site is not blocked. It lives on the same street as the one that was, and they closed the whole street.

How to tell whether this is your case

You do not need to be technical. The pattern is so distinctive that it takes two minutes to recognise:

• From outside Spain it works. A friend, a customer or a relative in another country opens it with no trouble.
• One operator works and another does not. Try it on mobile data if your phone is with a different company than your home line.
• No error appears. The page keeps loading and eventually gives up. It does not say «error», it does not say «under maintenance»: it says nothing.
• It starts and stops abruptly, and it happens to coincide with kick-off.

There is even a site, hayahora.futbol, publishing in real time which addresses each operator is blocking. If the problem were yours —a server down, a broken site, an unpaid hosting bill— it would fail from outside Spain too. If it works from abroad, it is not yours.

And why you, if you do not stream football?

Because the internet address your site sits on is not only yours. It is like a building: you have your flat, but the entrance is shared with thousands of neighbours, and if they lock the entrance, everybody is left outside.

Picking your neighbours is not an option on Cloudflare's ordinary plans: the address is assigned to you. Hence how random it feels, and why you can have two websites and one weekend one goes down and the next weekend the other one does.

What you can do

Four roads, and three of them are bad:

1. Wait. That is two or three hours with no shop, with your advertising burning budget against a page that will not open and customers assuming you have closed down.
2. Drop Cloudflare entirely. No more blocks, and no more of the speed and protection it gave you the rest of the month either.
3. Pay for an address of your own. It exists, but it sits in enterprise plans and does not fit a normal shop's budget.
4. Step out of Cloudflare only while the block lasts and step back in as soon as it passes. This is the sensible one: for those hours your site is served straight from your own server, which is on no list, and the rest of the month nothing changes.

The catch with the fourth is that it means paying attention, doing it by hand and doing it fast, on a Saturday at ten at night. So we automated it.

How we solved it

We wrote a small program that lives on the server and does exactly that, on its own and without bothering anyone: every minute it checks whether your address has entered the block lists. If it has, it takes your site out of Cloudflare so it stays reachable. When the block lifts, it puts it back. The change takes about twenty seconds to take effect and nothing needs touching.

We built it because we needed it: we run bookflowr.com and the domains of the businesses using it, and losing Saturday evenings was not an option. Since plenty of people have the same problem, we have published it free and open source on GitHub, with installation instructions for anyone comfortable on a server.

What you notice while it lasts

During those hours your site is served straight from your own server: it loads a little slower for visitors far away and goes without Cloudflare's filter. As soon as the block lifts, everything returns to normal on its own.

In exchange, your shop stays open and you keep selling, which is the whole point on a Saturday night.

Is this happening to you and you do not know where to start?

If what you have read sounds a little too much like your case, write to us and we will look at it. Working out whether this is it takes half an hour, and if it is, we will leave the system installed and running so you never notice it again.

Same goes if your site drops now and then and you have never known why. Sometimes it is this, sometimes the server is simply too small and sometimes it is robots eating the machine, but knowing is already half the problem solved. And if what you get is an error 500 or a blank screen, that is another story: we cover it in what to do about a PrestaShop error 500.

And if you'd rather not keep an eye on any of this, our PrestaShop maintenance keeps your shop monitored all year, and if something breaks we reply in under 12 hours.

Tell us about your case