Why is your VPN not working?
A short guided check for the common VPN failures: no internet while connected, sites not loading, repeated dropouts, and services that refuse VPN traffic.
What is the VPN doing?
With the VPN switched off, does the internet work normally?
Does this affect one site or everything?
Have you tried a different VPN server?
Which kind of device?
Are you on a public, workplace or campus network?
What is most likely happening
Low confidence — based on what you have told us so far
- possibleNothing stands out yetWhat you have told us does not point anywhere in particular. The steps below are free and are worth working through in order.
What we do not know
- We do not know whether the internet works with the VPN switched off. That single check separates a VPN problem from a connection problem faster than anything else here.
- We do not know what the VPN is doing wrong. Picking the closest description above narrows this down considerably.
- We do not know whether this affects one site or everything. They have completely different causes.
- We do not know whether another server behaves differently.
Free things to try, in order
- immediateTurn the VPN off and check the internet works without itThis separates a VPN problem from a connection problem in about ten seconds, and it is the first thing worth knowing. If nothing works with the VPN off either, the VPN is not the thing to investigate.
- immediateFully quit and reopen the VPN appA VPN that shows as connected while nothing loads is often a stale tunnel — the app believes it is up and the routing underneath is not. Quitting properly, rather than toggling the switch, rebuilds it.
A VPN is relevant to what you have described. What matters most varies by situation, so there is nothing more specific we can say from this alone.
The one check worth doing first
Turn the VPN off and see whether the internet works. It takes ten seconds and it splits the problem in half: if nothing works either way, the VPN is not what needs fixing, and every minute spent on it is wasted. That is why it is the second question above.
Connected but nothing loads
The most common single failure. A VPN app can believe its tunnel is up while the routing underneath it has quietly failed — the switch says connected, and nothing passes. Fully quitting and reopening the app rebuilds it; toggling the switch often does not, because the app never lets go of the broken state.
The other frequent cause is a kill switch doing exactly its job. It blocks all traffic when the tunnel drops, on purpose, to stop anything leaking. On an unstable connection that looks identical to the internet being down.
When a service refuses to work
If one service fails while everything else is fine, that service is almost certainly declining traffic from known VPN servers. Many streaming platforms and banks do this deliberately. Nothing is broken on your side, and no amount of reconfiguring changes their decision.
The reliable answer is to turn the VPN off for that service — most apps let you exclude specific apps or sites while leaving everything else protected. Whether a particular service permits VPN use is a matter for their terms, which are worth reading before working around anything.
Networks that block VPNs
Some public, workplace and campus networks block VPN traffic as a matter of policy. If your VPN works on mobile data but not on a particular network, the network is the difference. Where a network has rules about this, they are worth respecting.