Customers of Movistar, Spain's largest internet provider, were unable to reach the company's own customer support community on Saturday evening after the forum's address was blocked under an anti-piracy court order obtained by the football league LaLiga and Telefonica's broadcasting arm.
The site, comunidad.movistar.es, is where Movistar customers go for help with routers, Movistar Plus+ programming and reports of outages. It became unreachable shortly after 22:00, and a user on X flagged the failure at 22:17, according to TorrentFreak, which reported the block.
The blocking regime stems from a ruling of Commercial Court No. 6 in Barcelona on 18 December 2024. LaLiga and Telefonica Audiovisual Digital, which broadcasts LaLiga matches on Movistar Plus+, obtained the order. It applies to Spain's largest internet providers, Telefonica's own included.
Under the programme, providers must block hundreds of IP addresses each match weekend that LaLiga links to unlicensed football streams. Blocks typically begin shortly before a match and are lifted once the broadcast ends. LaLiga and Telefonica Audiovisual Digital may add successor addresses on their own assessment, so the list changes from week to week.
At the time of the block the support forum was served from two Cloudflare IP addresses. According to the HayAhoraFutbol tracker, which monitors the match-day lists, every operator blocked both. LaLiga began including Cloudflare addresses in February 2025.
Customers of the provider DIGI were shown a blocking notice citing the December 2024 ruling. Telefonica routed the address into a black hole, so its own customers received no response at all.
By Sunday, comunidad.movistar.es resolved to movistar.lithium.com and was being served through Amazon CloudFront rather than Cloudflare. Who moved it, and whether the move was a response to the block, has not been stated.
Neither LaLiga nor Movistar has explained why the forum's addresses were on the list. LaLiga has said the blocks are court-backed rather than indiscriminate, and that third parties can complain through a dedicated mailbox. It describes the system as "focused, precise, and without collateral impact on legitimate services".
That description survives the weekend intact. The site that disappeared was a support community run by the company that asked for the blocking order, which makes it the one address on the Spanish internet whose blocking cannot be described as collateral. It was not caught in any crossfire. It was on the list.
Nor can the outcome be called an impact on a legitimate service, because the test of legitimacy now in operation is appearing on the list, and the forum appeared on it. The system identified a target, the target was blocked, and the target turned out to belong to the system's author. Precision of that order is difficult to improve upon.
The arrangement is also self-correcting. A customer unable to reach a website on a Saturday evening would ordinarily report the problem to the support forum, which was the website they could not reach. No report was filed, and a programme that generates no complaints is, by its own measure, operating without collateral impact.
The Department of Unnecessary Research notes that the blocklist is dynamic, that successor addresses may be added each weekend on the rights holders' own assessment, and that the forum has now quietly moved to a new hosting provider, which is the behaviour the order exists to detect.
Telefonica has therefore arrived at the only standard of enforcement that can never produce a false positive. A rights holder that blocks its own customers has stopped guessing who the pirates are.