You typed that question because everything stopped loading a moment ago and you cannot tell whether it broke for you or for everyone. Here is a method that answers it in a minute, and our own numbers.
In short. “Today” is almost never a day — it is minutes. We measure only ourselves, and here is our worst result from the latest measured stretch: on 22 September 2026 one of our exits was unreachable for 13 minutes — 03:03 to 03:16 UTC. Not a day, not “every VPN”, not forever. About anyone else's service we know nothing, and we will not make it up. What we can do is hand you five checks that tell four identical-looking failures apart.
We make Mayak. An Android app: it encrypts your traffic, offers four countries, and quietly tries four different routes in a row when the first one does not go through. We publish our measurements as they are — including, in this article, our own outage. 7 days free once you confirm your email, no card needed. The trial is free and needs no card; without an email it is 3 days.
What we do not promise: that nothing ever breaks on our side. It does — that is exactly what the next section is about.
🍎 On iPhone Mayak works through the third-party Happ app — with the subscription link from your account. Happ is not in the Russian App Store; there incy (publisher LLC ITDEV) works instead, checked on 22 September 2026.
Why “today” is the wrong unit
The word “today” in your question means a day. The failure that made you type it is almost certainly shorter — often it ends before you finish reading this page. We can only show that on ourselves, because ourselves is all we measure.
On 22 September 2026 one of our exits in the Netherlands went dark for 13 minutes — 03:03 to 03:16 UTC. People connected through that exit in those minutes had no internet at all. That is a fact, and it is not a flattering one.
The interesting part is how we know. Trusting a machine's own report about itself is a bad habit: a machine that has fallen over often keeps insisting it is fine. So we counted something that does not belong to us at all. Any public address on the internet is probed around the clock by strangers' scanners. That noise is steady, it runs on its own, and it takes no orders from us: 8055 packets over 36 hours, three to four a minute, without gaps.
| Minute (UTC) | Packets from strangers' scanners | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 02:58 — 03:03 | 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3 | normal background: the machine is visible |
| 03:04 — 03:15 | none at all | no connectivity — 13 minutes |
| 03:16 | 11 — the backlog | connectivity is back |
| 03:17 — 03:18 | 3, 5 | normal background again |
Across those same 36 hours this was the only gap longer than four minutes. The machine itself kept running: every service on it was alive, nothing restarted. What disappeared was the link to the facility hosting it — the cause sat outside our server, and we are not hiding that.
This is why “today” misleads. Thirteen minutes feel exactly like the end of the world: the app will not connect, pages will not load, and the first thought is “that's it, it's down today”. A quarter of an hour later everything is back. A more useful question than “what is down today” is “where did it break” — and that one has an answer in about a minute.
Four failures that look the same
From the phone's screen all four look like one thing: “no internet”. They are four different problems, and they need four different moves.
| What you see | Where it most likely broke | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The app will not connect at all: it spins, then gives up | your side, or your provider | change country and network (steps 2 and 3); the causes are in “no VPN connects” |
| Connected, the icon is on, but nothing loads | the route exists, the traffic does not move | a separate case with its own write-up — “connected but no internet” |
| Everything opens except one site | the site's decision, not your connection | not a connectivity failure: why sites ask you to verify you are human |
| The connection drops and comes back by itself | usually the phone, not the network | step-by-step — “the connection keeps dropping” |
The third row is worth remembering separately, because it hides behind the “what's down today” question more often than the rest. On 22 September 2026 we requested the front pages of twelve sites from four of our own addresses — in the Netherlands, Poland, Germany and Russia. Avito, Wildberries, Ozon and DNS-Shop refused all four alike, the Russian address included; Google, Wikipedia, Gosuslugi, Mail.ru and GitHub opened from everywhere. So the refusal was not about the country and not about the connection at all: the site decided. Switching services would change nothing there.
A minute of checks: five steps
The order is chosen so that each step rules out a whole class of causes. Stop at the first one that works — the rest are unnecessary.
- Open the “what is my address” page twice: with the connection on, and with it off. If the address and country change, the connection is alive and your traffic is going through it. The problem is then not the connection but whatever you are trying to reach.
- Switch networks: mobile data to Wi-Fi or the other way round. If that fixes it, the network was the problem, not “VPNs today”. Home, mobile and public networks behave differently, and it is measurable.
- Change the exit country. If that fixes it, one exit went down — not “every VPN”. That is precisely what happened to us on 22 September: one of four locations stopped answering.
- Ask one person near you on the same operator. Same problem — it is not your phone. No problem — it is your phone, which is good news: that gets fixed faster.
- Restart the app, then the phone. Dull, but it closes a noticeable share of cases: Android has exactly one slot for a secure connection, and another app can be holding it even while closed.
What the method buys you: by step five you know whether your provider, your network, your phone or one specific site is at fault. Those are four different answers, and none of them is called “today”.
In Mayak, step three is one tap. Four countries to pick from (Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Russia), and when a route does not go through the app tries four of them in a row without asking you. No payment details for the trial. A confirmed email opens the access — 7 free days. An email is optional: without one the trial is 3 days.
🍎 On iPhone Mayak works through the third-party Happ app — with the subscription link from your account. Happ is not in the Russian App Store; there incy (publisher LLC ITDEV) works instead, checked on 22 September 2026.
“My service is down today”
This is the most common version of the question: someone names their app and asks what is wrong with it. The honest answer is short and unsatisfying: we do not know. We do not measure anyone else's service — not their servers, not their apps. Writing “X is having an outage today” would mean repeating someone else's claim, and a repeated claim is not a measurement. We also keep no “what works right now” list, for the same reason.
What we can offer instead is the method above. It answers half the question on its own: if at step three another app brings up no country at all while the internet works fine without it, the problem is almost certainly at that service — and only it can tell you why. Its support, its channel, its status page if it has one.
One more thing, without which this page would be dishonest. This page does not show what is happening right now. It was written once, on 22 September 2026, and that date is printed at the top. No article can know about your particular day — and the ones that claim otherwise are usually just pasting today's date into a heading. We do not do that. The five checks, on the other hand, work on any day, including yours.
What we measure about ourselves
- Four exit countries. As of 22 September 2026 the app offers the Netherlands, Poland, Germany and Russia. That is a live answer from our server, not a line from an ad.
- Four routes in a row. When the first way of connecting does not go through, the app quietly tries the next, up to four times. You never see this — you only see that connecting took longer than usual.
- Our own outages. We count them and we name them: 13 minutes on 22 September, on one exit out of four — the minute-by-minute table is above.
- What we do not have. A public status page — “what is happening with Mayak right now” — does not exist on our side yet, and we are not going to pretend it does. How we measure things in general is written up separately.
Why write about our own outage when nobody forces us to. Because the promise “it always works” means one of two things: either nobody is measuring, or somebody is measuring and not telling. Both are worse than an honest thirteen minutes.
What we tested
- The outage on our own exit. 22 September 2026, 03:03–03:16 UTC, one exit in the Netherlands. Measured not from the machine's own reports but by counting packets from strangers' scanners arriving at its public address: 8055 packets over 36 hours, three to four a minute, and exactly one gap longer than four minutes in all 36.
- Twelve sites from four addresses. 22 September 2026, front pages, requested with a mobile browser header. Ten of them are laid out with the response table in a separate article.
- The country list. Taken as a live answer from our server on 22 September 2026, not copied from an older text.
What we do not know
- Anything about other services. We have measured none of them, not once. Any sentence we wrote about them would be a guess.
- What your operator is doing in your city. We have neither home nor mobile addresses to measure from, and networks behave differently from town to town. We see our own side only.
- What tomorrow looks like. We make no “always works” promise: on 22 September we ourselves were down for 13 minutes. Our promise is to measure and to tell, not that nothing will break.
- Why a site refused you specifically. Platform rules are private. We see the response, not the reason, and we will not guess at it.
- The state of things right now. We have no status page, and this article is a dated text, not a dashboard.
Short answers
Is the VPN down today? We do not know and we do not invent: other services are not something we measure. About ourselves — on 22 September 2026 one of our four exits was unreachable for 13 minutes and worked the rest of the time.
Why is it not working today? There are four causes and they look identical on screen. A minute of checks separates them: address, network, country, a neighbour, a restart.
Is it everyone or just me? Step four answers that exactly: ask one person near you on the same operator. Faster than searching for an answer online.
Nothing connects at all — what is that? Usually the phone rather than the network: Android has one slot for a secure connection and another app can be holding it. The write-up with numbers is here.
Which one works right now? We keep no list of other apps: we have not measured them, and praising the unmeasured is the same as lying. About ourselves we publish the good numbers and the bad ones.
How long do these usually last? By our single measured case — 13 minutes. That is one case, not a rule, and we are not going to dress it up as one.
Does changing country help? If one exit went down, yes, immediately. If the refusal came from the site itself, no — that decision was not made on your side.
What if it connects but there is no internet? That is a separate failure with its own write-up — “connected but no internet”.