Your VPN stopped working: is it gone, and what moves with you

The service you were paying for has stopped answering. Below: how to tell a bad night from a dead provider, what happens to the money you already paid, and what actually moves with you to a new one.

“Tonight” or “for good”: three checks

From the outside, “down tonight” and “gone for good” look exactly the same: you press the button and nothing happens. The difference is whether anything on their side still answers. A live provider having a bad day usually keeps talking to you — the connection just will not form. A provider that is finished goes quiet everywhere at once.

Before you conclude anything, try again, more than once. That is not a brush-off: in our own journal two thirds of failed attempts end in success on the very next attempt by the same person — we took that measurement apart in a separate article. We have measured nothing about your provider, but the nature of a network failure is the same for everyone.

1. Read what it actually says. A specific error — “invalid key”, “subscription expired”, “server busy”, “device limit reached” — means you were heard and answered. That is not the end of a provider, it is a message from one. An endless spinner and “connection timed out”, on the other hand, tell you nothing: an overloaded server, a switched-off one and a weak signal all look like that.
2. Open their website and their billing page in an ordinary browser, with the tunnel off. Site loads, billing works, the app store listing is still there — the company is alive and most likely having a hard day. A site that has been unreachable for days is a different conversation.
3. Try a different network. Mobile data instead of Wi-Fi, or the other way round. If it works, the problem was your network rather than the provider, and you need not go anywhere. If nothing works anywhere for several days — now you have a reason to look for a replacement.

An honest caveat, and an important one: we have not measured a single other provider and we do not know why yours stopped. These three checks describe how network failures work in general, not anyone’s particular outage. If your provider is still answering you in words, write to their support before moving anywhere — they have an answer that we do not.

The money you already paid

The most common and least pleasant question. Straight answer: neither we nor any other provider can return somebody else’s money to you — we have nothing to do with it. What you can do depends entirely on how you paid.

• A subscription through an app store. Then the money went through the store rather than straight to the provider, and cancellations and refunds are handled there, in your store account. While you are there, check that the subscription is not still billing you for a service you no longer use: it lives separately from the app and does not switch itself off when the app is deleted.
• A card on their website. Then it is between you and them — their support first, and your bank after that if nobody replies. We are in no position to tell you how it will end: we have seen neither their terms nor your payment.
• A one-off key for a fixed period. As a rule there is nothing to refund — you bought access until a date, not a subscription. On the upside, nothing should keep charging you either; worth checking once and forgetting.

And one hope that never works out: a paid key or subscription with one provider does not turn into access with another. That is not greed or a cartel — it is what the thing is. A key is not a password you can present anywhere; it is the name of your device inside one particular network, and outside it the name means nothing. The full explanation, with a measurement, is in our article about keys and devices.

What moves with you, and what never does

Since the key does not move, exactly one thing does: your list of devices. So when you switch, count neither people nor gigabytes but phones, tablets, TVs and computers that need access. This is the question people ask most often when changing provider: how many devices per account, can I add a second phone, can I share with my partner or my kid.

Here is how it works with us, so you have something to compare the next provider against:

• Billing is by devices, not by traffic. Speed does not depend on the plan and we do not count gigabytes at all — plans differ only in how many devices they cover.
• There is nothing to share, and that is deliberate. The key pair is generated on the phone itself, the secret half never leaves it, and only the public half reaches our server. A second phone — even on the same account — generates its own pair and takes its own slot.
• Reinstalling the app does not eat a slot. We recognise the same phone after a reinstall and do not take a second slot for it.
• An honest limitation. The config file for a Linux computer is issued one per country, and a new file for the same country disables the previous one. A second such computer on the same country from one account is not possible right now — that is a limit of how we issue files, and we are not hiding it.

One practical detail people forget when switching: Android has only one slot for this kind of connection. While the old app holds it, the new one will not connect and will look broken even though it is fine. Switch the old app off first, or better remove it — we took that case apart separately.

Five questions for the next provider

Trading one unknown for another is a poor strategy. Here are five questions worth asking anyone, us included. We answer each one for ourselves — compare.

1. How many paths does a connection have if one stops working? A provider with a single path goes dark entirely on the day that path stops. Us: the app tries several routes in turn, by itself, with no input and no settings from you — how that works.
2. What happens when one machine goes down? The question is not whether it goes down (everyone’s does) but what happens then. Us: a whole country is not switched off on the word of a single machine — a real case is below.
3. Is the bill for traffic or for devices? This decides whether a surprise bill arrives after a month of heavy video. Us: devices; we do not meter traffic.
4. Can you leave, and what stays behind with them? A good sign is when the secret part of the key is physically not stored by the provider. Us: it is generated on your phone and never leaves it.
5. Do they publish the whole measurement? Anyone will show you the flattering half. Ask about the other one: how many attempts failed, when they were last down. Us: how we measure, and the next section is entirely about this.

We break too: our thirteen minutes

It would be dishonest to write an article called “your provider broke, come to us” and say nothing about our own failures. On 22 September 2026 one of our exit servers — a machine in the Netherlands — lost its connection to the internet for thirteen minutes. People who were on it during those minutes had no internet. That is bad, and there is nothing to soften.

What we can honestly say about it:

• We learned it from our own instruments, not from users. The alert fired by itself; the machine reported that it had lost its way out to the internet, even though it could still talk to us.
• The country did not go dark. Our server did not shut down the whole direction on one machine’s word, and kept serving while that machine came back.
• It came back on its own after thirteen minutes — within the margin this is designed for.
• The cause was not our machine but the datacentre’s provider. That does not excuse us: we chose the provider.

We tell this not because the story flatters us, but because “we never go down” would be a lie from any provider. Everyone goes down. What providers actually differ in is how long it lasts, whether everything else goes with it, and whether they tell you out loud.

What we do not know

• Anything about your previous provider. We have measured no other provider — not speed, not availability, not the reasons for their outages — and so we claim nothing about them. Whether yours comes back, we do not know either.
• What will happen to your money. We have seen neither your former provider’s terms nor your payment. Everything above is “where to take the question”, not a prediction of the answer.
• That we will have no outages. We will. The most recent one is described above, and it happened on the day this article was published.
• How your own network will behave. Our journal is our users, our builds and our days. Your home, your city and your carrier may differ — which is exactly what a trial with no card is for.

Short answers

It is not working today — is that the end? Probably not. Try again, and from a different network: in our journal two thirds of failed attempts succeed on the next one. The worrying sign is not one evening but several days of silence together with an unreachable website.

The server stopped responding. What do I do? Check whether any text at all comes back from them. An error message means you are heard, and it is a question for their support. Total silence on every network for days is a reason to look elsewhere.

Can I move my key or subscription to another provider? No, and that does not depend on anyone’s goodwill. A key is the name of a device inside one particular network and means nothing outside it. More here.

How many devices per account? With us that is the plan: plans differ by number of devices, not by speed or traffic. A second phone takes a second slot; the same phone after a reinstall does not.

Can a family share one key? One key — no: it is generated on the phone and never leaves it. Connecting several people is possible by counting devices — how exactly, with a measurement.

The new app will not connect even though I deleted the old one. Check that the old one is really off: Android has one slot for this kind of connection, and an occupied slot looks exactly like a broken new app. The breakdown.

What makes you different? Honestly: several paths instead of one, billing by devices instead of traffic, a key we do not hold, and measurements we publish together with the inconvenient half — including our own outage on publication day. You need not take any of it on trust: the trial needs no card.