Twitch banned in Spain after football league attempts to stop online piracy
Twitch, along with dozens of other private websites, are being blocked en masse by ISPs in Spain due to piracy concerns from the LaLiga football league.
Twitchis one of the most popular live streaming websites in the world — but while numerous influencers have made their careers broadcasting original content on the platform, some use it to skirt around copyright restrictions,pirating TV showsor movies so others can watch for free.
This is a major concern for Spain’s highest professional football league, LaLiga, which obtained a court order in February 2025 to block websites it feared might illegally stream matches.
However, there’s a big issue with this. In doing so, the order essentially threw the baby out with the bathwater and blocked a horde of IP addresses en masse, many of which are used by regular people and private businesses.
🛜 Los bloqueos de LaLiga contra la piratería llegan también a las redes sociales.🟣 Las emisiones de Twitch sufrieron problemas el pasado fin de semana para usuarios de Movistar y Digi.❌ La patronal bloqueó algunas direcciones IP utilizadas para alojar servidores de vídeo.pic.twitter.com/vqmb1km0ku
Spanish businesses lose tens of thousands of Euros amid IP bans
These addresses include services like Amazon, GitHub, Cloudflare and even Twitch — meaning that your average Joe can’t access these sites, despite being completely innocent and uninvolved in any kind of piracy.
Because a lot of these services share IP addresses, Spain’s piracy countermeasures are having a disastrous impact on many businesses that use these websites for their day-to-day operations, dealing them a huge financial blow.
What’s more, Spain’s laws don’t require transparency about these IP blocks, leaving users completely in the dark as to why they suddenly can’t access certain sites.
This has been happening since February 2025, as perreports from Torrentfreak. Despite backlash from Spanish citizens and businesses, the government has only increased the amount and frequency of websites being blocked.
On June 06, 2025, LaLiga met with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) to discuss piracy of online sports events, after which even more sites were blocked.
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📺 LALIGA attends the@EU_IPOconference on combating audiovisual fraud of live sports events.💬 “Success depends on coordinated cross-border action, across different sectors and digital infrastructures,” Andrea Di Carlo, Deputy Executive Director of EUIPO.
This isn’t the first time Twitch has been blocked in other countries, but the reasons for these suspensions were markedly different. For example, in February 2024, Turkiye temporarilybanned both Twitch and Kickover gambling concerns.
And that same month, Twitch completelyhalted operations in South Koreadue to “prohibitively expensive” operating costs.
