Steam users in Spain suffered technical issues because LaLiga keeps targeting Cloudfare sites to fight piracy

Javier Tebas, LaLiga president, has waged war against piracy for years, targeting any site or IPTV that shows or distributes football games for free online. And he has been doing it no matter the cost. In his crusade, many innocent people are paying the price.

In short, Tebas and LaLiga are targeting any domain that is associated to Cloudfare, a company that provides services like cybersecurity to websites, used by thousands of websites to better protect against attacks.

One of the services Cloudfare uses is hide the identity of its operators, which makes Cloudfare particularly useful for websites that offer unlawful content, like free streaming of football and sports content (or movies and TV). And for the past few months, thousands of users of completely legal websites (including banks, educational websites...) that use Cloudfare have reported issues regularly in Spain... caused, apparently, because LaLiga targets indiscriminately every domain that use Cloudfare, knowing that most piracy sites use it.

The most recent episode, reported by users on Sunday in Spain, has affected Steam, the video game platform by Valve. As reported by ComputerHoy, thousands of users weren't able to load pages or images properly in the platform. Those issues weren't caused by any problem on Valve's side, and all signs point again towards LaLiga using their legal teams to block domains associated with Cloudfare. That way, they took down piracy sites that streamed football games for free (particularly the Clásico on Sunday afternoon) but also other sites that are completely legal and have nothing to do with LaLiga interests... like Steam.