Heh, lucky you, at least you get a message. My ISP just drops traffic to the affected IPs. No ping, no traceroute, just a spinner in the browser until it says "page not found".

Every response and comment from LaLiga, the football organization responsible for this, has been so far that this is a minor issue that only affects a few bunch of nerds who talk about "docker images" or "github repositories" or "whatever that means".

Meanwhile, there are testimonies of smart home devices like anti-theft alarms or automatic doors, that stop working whenever there is a football match, because their backends rely on Cloudflare.

Last week, a woman asked for help on social media, as the GPS tracking app she uses to see where her father with dementia is, went offline during a match. It was getting late and he still wasn't back home, and she couldn't locate the tag he was wearing to find him: https://www.infobae.com/america/agencias/2026/04/05/laliga-d...

It's hard to say this, because no one should experience an event like this, but as stressful as these are, it's the only way to make the mainstream people care about this censorship. "I cannot pull a docker image" will never be on nightly news, but safety and personal security is a more powerful driver for discourses.

This is a great example of why blanket IP blocking is such a terrible enforcement mechanism. Cloudflare hosts hundreds of thousands of services behind shared IP ranges — blocking one IP to stop a piracy stream takes out everything else on that IP, including Docker registries, API endpoints, and CDNs that have nothing to do with football.

  The real fix on your end until Spain sorts this out: set up a pull-through registry cache (e.g. registry:2 with proxy.remoteurl) on a VPS outside Spain, and point your Docker daemon's mirror config at it. Your
  GitLab runner pulls from the cache, the cache pulls from Docker Hub via a non-blocked IP. Also insulates you from Docker Hub rate limits.

  But yeah, the fact that a court order about football streaming can break docker pull for an entire country is genuinely absurd.

They block the whole of Cloudflare R2, I believe the Docker hub is just (heh) a collateral.

When the La Liga match starts, everything that's proxied via CF (including zero access reverse tunnels) stops working.

There's even a website made for checking if the match is on: https://hayahora.futbol/

You can check if your host is affected: https://hayahora.futbol/#comprobador&domain=docker-images-pr...

This is why technology businesses and professionals need to take a little bit of an active role in local politics. Otherwise you get nonsense.

Time to use a VPN in your docker pipelines ;) Or run your systems outside of Spain.

Or can this be avoided by using an alternate DNS?

This is a know issue and it is completely fucked up: https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/cloudflar...

What Spain does is basically censorship and it's very poorly executed. The docker image registry is only one out of the many collateral victims of this stupid law.

CF could just sue LaLiga and the judge as interrupting and intercepting telecomms it's a really serious crime in Spain. Call the AEPD too because of consumers' right against both ISP and LaLiga's snooping. Another huge fine.

This is not an issue under the civil code (civilian issues), but something to be dealt under penal (criminal) code.

In Spanish

https://www.fiscal.es/memorias/memoria2020/FISCALIA_SITE/rec...

Oh, and BTW, LaLiga has just partnered with a CF rival.

Now CF can just sue both like hell because of unfair competition:

https://nitter.tiekoetter.com/xataka/status/2042658662850724...

Off topic but I wonder when Cloudflare is going to launch their own Docker registry as a product.

Spain is a failing country. Their economy is in shambles and the government has ceded internet control to a private corporation who runs football games.

Yeah, I know. Welcome to the club :(

https://x.com/ahachete/status/2035783292549755228

Yea, La Liga it's crapping out as always. Docker needs either some I2P gateway, or a Tor service.

Cloudflare is cancer. And the tumor is now too big.