Piracy Shield Cloudflare Disaster Blocks Countless Sites, Fires Up Opposition

Following a statement that Italy's all-new anti-piracy system had received top marks from telecoms regulator AGCOM for "working perfectly," on Saturday the truth came out in all its glory.

Around 16:13 on Saturday, an IP address within Cloudflare's AS13335, which currently accounts for 42,243,794 domains according to IPInfo, was targeted for blocking. Ownership of IP address 188.114.97.7 can be linked to Cloudflare in a few seconds, and doubled checked in a few seconds more.

The service that rightsholders wanted to block was not the IP address's sole user. There's a significant chance of that being the case whenever Cloudflare IPs enter the equation; blocking this IP always risked taking out the target plus all other sites using it.

Why blocking went ahead anyway has no good answers; from didn't check and don't understand to oops, too late…, how it managed to traverse the claimed checks and balances defies logic. Giorgio Bonfiglio, Principal Technical Account Manager at Amazon Web Services, warned of this specific risk last year. Some of the best advice available, pro bono, yet simply ignored.