Why Fotify (and Many Other Sites) Sometimes Fail in Spain — And How to Fix It

If you've tried to use Fotify from Spain — especially on a weekend — and the dashboard refused to load, the upload page got stuck, or the gallery flat-out timed out, you almost certainly weren't doing anything wrong. You hit a court-ordered block that targets the CDN we (and tens of thousands of other sites) run on. This post explains what's happening, why it isn't a Fotify bug, and the one-minute fix.

TL;DR

• Spanish ISPs (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, MásMóvil and the rest) are intermittently blocking large blocks of Cloudflare IP addresses inside Spain.
• The blocks were requested by La Liga (the Spanish football league) to fight illegal match streaming, and a Spanish court ordered ISPs to enforce them.
• Cloudflare hosts a huge slice of the modern internet — so the side-effect is that legitimate, totally unrelated sites become unreachable during the blocks. Fotify is one of them.
• The blocks generally line up with La Liga match windows: Saturday and Sunday afternoons/evenings, plus midweek games.
• The reliable workaround is a VPN. Any reputable VPN with a non-Spanish exit node fixes it in seconds.

What's actually going on

To deliver photos, RSVPs, and live galleries fast all over the world, Fotify sits behind Cloudflare, a global CDN and edge network. So do GitHub, Discord, Twitch, large chunks of Shopify, ChatGPT, Vercel, and a long list of services people use every day. When you visit fotify.app, your browser opens a connection to a Cloudflare edge IP, and Cloudflare hands you our content.

For the last couple of years, La Liga has been waging a legal campaign in Spain to shut down pirate football streams. Many of those pirate streams happen to also use Cloudflare to hide their origin servers. La Liga's solution — backed by a Spanish court — was to ask ISPs to block ranges of Cloudflare IP addresses inside Spain during match windows.

The problem with that approach is that a Cloudflare IP isn't dedicated to a single website. A single IP serves thousands of unrelated tenants. So when an ISP blackholes that IP for "a pirate stream," it blackholes:

• legitimate businesses
• WordPress blogs
• SaaS dashboards
• developer tooling like GitHub Pages
• streaming platforms
• and yes, photo-sharing platforms for weddings and events like Fotify

Cloudflare itself has publicly objected to this in court and in blog posts, calling the orders disproportionate and harmful to the open internet. EU digital rights groups (Xnet, Reglamento, RootedCON and others) have filed complaints. As of this writing the blocks are still in place on weekends.

How to tell if this is what's hitting you

You're probably affected by the Cloudflare/La Liga block if all of the following are true:

1. You're connecting from Spain on a Spanish ISP (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, MásMóvil, Yoigo, Pepephone, Digi, etc.).
2. Fotify works fine on mobile data sometimes and fails on home Wi-Fi (or vice-versa, depending on the carrier).
3. The failure is intermittent — fine Tuesday morning, broken Saturday night.
4. Other Cloudflare-hosted sites are also broken at the same time. Quick tests: try opening github.com, discord.com, chatgpt.com, or any major dev tooling site. If several of them are slow or unreachable, it's the block, not Fotify.

If only Fotify is broken and everything else works perfectly, it's something else — email us at support@fotify.app and we'll look into it.

The fix: use a VPN

A VPN routes your traffic out through a server outside Spain before it touches the open internet. From Cloudflare's perspective, you look like a user in France, Germany, the UK or the US — wherever the VPN exit lives — and you don't pass through the blocked Spanish ISP path at all. The whole problem disappears.

You don't need anything fancy. Any reputable VPN will work:

• NordVPN, Surfshark, ExpressVPN, Mullvad, Proton VPN — paid options
• Proton VPN free tier, Cloudflare WARP (1.1.1.1) — free options
• A self-hosted WireGuard or Tailscale exit node if you're technical

Steps once you have one installed:

1. Open the VPN app.
2. Pick a server outside Spain (Portugal, France, Germany, UK and the Netherlands all work well from Iberia).
3. Connect.
4. Reload Fotify. Uploads, dashboard, RSVPs, the whole thing should be back to normal.

If you're an organizer with a wedding or event happening right now and your phone won't upload, Proton VPN's free tier is the fastest option — install, sign up with email, pick "Netherlands" or "France," done.

Mobile data vs. home Wi-Fi

Different Spanish carriers implement the block differently. Mobile data on one network might be unaffected while another network's fibre is fully blocked. If you're stuck on your home connection, switching to your phone's 4G/5G hotspot sometimes bypasses the issue without needing a VPN — worth a quick test before installing anything.

What about DNS changes? Or 1.1.1.1?

A common bad tip going around: "Just change your DNS to Google or Cloudflare DNS." That doesn't work for this block. The blocks are at the IP layer, not DNS. Your ISP isn't refusing to resolve fotify.app; it's refusing to route traffic to the Cloudflare IP fotify.app resolves to.

Cloudflare's own WARP app is a partial exception because it tunnels your traffic over Cloudflare's own network — when it works, it bypasses the ISP block. It's free, it's lightweight, and on many Spanish networks it's enough. Worth trying before a full VPN.

What is Fotify doing about it on our side?

Honestly: there isn't much any single Cloudflare customer can do. Moving off Cloudflare entirely would be a months-long migration and would only push the problem somewhere else — the same legal mechanism applies to any CDN, and other CDNs like Akamai and Fastly have been hit too. What we are doing:

• Monitoring: We watch real-time error rates from Spanish IPs and confirm when a block window starts.
• Banner: Spanish visitors see an in-app banner pointing to this post during failure windows, so people aren't left wondering whether their event is broken.
• Documenting workarounds: This post, our help articles, and our support team are all aligned on the same VPN-first guidance.

A note for event organizers in Spain

If you're hosting a wedding, party, or corporate event in Spain on a weekend, here's the practical advice:

1. Pre-test on the venue Wi-Fi a few days before the event — confirm Fotify loads. If it doesn't, that's the moment to set up the VPN, not at the ceremony.
2. Put a VPN on the event organizer's phone (yours, the wedding planner's, the photographer's). Anyone who has to manage uploads or the dashboard.
3. For guest uploads, the upload page itself is hit by the same blocks. Most guests won't have a VPN, so consider sharing a short note in your event invite or signage: "If you're in Spain and the upload page doesn't load, try a VPN or your mobile data."
4. Galleries and downloads are also Cloudflare-fronted, so the same trick — VPN or mobile data — applies to viewing photos after the event.

Is this going away?

Hopefully. Several digital rights organizations have appeals in front of Spanish and EU courts. Cloudflare itself has filed legal challenges. The disproportion is well-documented — one well-known case had a single block taking down GitHub, Twitch streams, and thousands of small-business sites in a single afternoon — and pressure is building on La Liga and the Spanish government to use more surgical enforcement instead of CDN-wide blocks.

Until that changes, the VPN workaround is the path of least resistance. Sorry it's not a more elegant answer.

Need help?

If you're stuck and the VPN approach isn't working, email support@fotify.app with:

• Your event ID (in the dashboard URL)
• Your ISP
• The approximate time you saw the failure
• Whether you're on mobile data or Wi-Fi

We can usually confirm in a couple of minutes whether you hit the block or something else, and we'll help you get unblocked either way.

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If you want to dig into the technical and legal side, check our help article on how to download all your event photos for tips on backing up galleries from any location, and our pricing page if you're evaluating Fotify for a Spanish event and want to know what to expect.