Why isn't my VPN working on Surfshark?

Why is Surfshark blocking my internet?

In addition to blocking ads, what I can't get to work is Surfshark blocking me.

It used to work fine with my ISP (Comcast) but now it's very sporadic. I've tried reinstalling the OS several times and haven't gotten rid of this issue. I'd like to get rid of the ad blocker and have surfshark just work without interference. You must enable JavaScript to view and post comments on this site. My Experience: I had SurfShark for 2 months and it gave my broadband intermittent access. So I uninstalled it and got a new ISP and still the same problem. Not sure why you think your connection is intermittent. Maybe try another cable / power strip?

I'll go out on a limb and guess what could be happening? I was getting constant speed issues for 2 years with this connection from Comcast until August 2025. I was getting 25 or less mb per second (1 hour downloads take 4-5 min instead of the usual half an hour.) No amount of research to upgrade a router would fix it, because every time I connected with Comcast they changed some settings so I couldn't even do my speed test. In August I bought a new router and everything was perfect. It's possible your current isp might need something similar like I did for 2 years. If that's the case there's not much surfshark can do about it.

I had a problem where I only got a few connections in a row. I tried a different cable and switched outlets but that didn't do any good. There was no problem if I downloaded something from anywhere else (netflix/youtube) but when I wanted to watch something live I had a problem getting speed from other devices on the network. What was going on was my server was being blocked by the modem, which then couldn't send its packet to the server. I tried all possible combinations of the server on different modems and cables and eventually found the right combination.

Does Surfshark affect internet connection?

How to stop it?

Hi, I got a new surfshark and just installed it. I tried to connect but my connection became slow and then I found out the internet connection was off. Now when I turn off the surfshark it doesn't work anymore. When it's on, the internet connection still is slow. But how can I keep it from affecting my connection? Do I need to uninstall the surfshark? If I need to uninstall it how do I uninstall it?

Why isn't my VPN working on Surfshark?

As you probably know, Surfshark offers free and open-source OpenVPN client software.

It's easy to use, and it supports almost every client protocol available for OpenVPN (TLS-based PPTP, L2TP, MS-CHAPv2, SSTP, DTLS, GRE, ). And it's open-source everything can be read on their website and GitHub repository. But the VPN client does not work on my PC when I try to connect it to a VPN server: It can't even connect!

This is probably because Surfshark has been built to use an extremely outdated open-source OpenVPN client. It might also be due to some other bug. Or maybe it's because I do not use the "correct" OpenVPN settings that Surfshark provides.

Surfshark's default OpenVPN settings cannot connect to any VPN server that I tried: That's obviously an issue! But since they don't provide any OpenVPN documentation, I needed a way to contact them. One of their admins (see their public email address in the footer of their website) answered me and told me that I should contact them about the VPN client issue in case I couldn't find answer anywhere else. In this article I share his advice, which I now followed by reporting this problem.

Before we continue, I need to briefly mention that surfshark VPN users have reported numerous bugs with the server software. They are very common, ranging from slow connections, to server crashing, to server disconnects. So if you have the server working OK, but just can't connect with the client (which happens to most users), please report a separate bug.

Connecting to OpenVPN servers behind Surfshark. Surfshark's official OpenVPN client fails to connect to any VPN server. But you can easily connect to any VPN server that supports OpenVPN.

The easy way to connect to a VPN server behind a firewall or behind a restrictive corporate network is to simply run the "proxylocaltunnel" command in SSH. Of course you must have some way to talk to the server using SSH, eg if it's a Linux or FreeBSD server or if you have a local SSH tunnel to your PC.

Why is my VPN blocking my internet?

I have a VPN setup that is completely unusable, for my purpose, which is to download torrents.

I am running Ubuntu 13.04. I do not have any other application connected to the internet.

When I try to download a torrent I get the following errors: It appears my main issue is how to find out what I need to add/remove/delete from the routing table to resolve this. I'm having this problem and I solved it by removing the iptables rules. If you try to see what you have on your rules with the following command sudo iptables -t nat -nvL -n --line-numbers. And remove the rules that start with `chain' and the `postrouting' and `forwarding' chains in the list you will see that they are the cause. The first rule you remove will break your connection (which is what happens when I disconnect the VPN).

Your post is very interesting. Thank you for this. I'll see if it's that easy.

I've tried removing some rules but I got no where with that. I can see that I have some rules: and a couple of forward chains, one being chain INPUT. They don't appear to be related to my issue.

I just deleted a forward rule and it says that the destination is unreachable. I've been looking around and I think that maybe I need to make some changes to the interfaces table. I'll try to look into it more. As of right now, I can say that it's definitely not your firewall or router doing anything wrong, because the connection works fine through my router and wireless (wireless through the router, and through the connection to my vpn). I'll try to see if there is anything in my interfaces file. Edit: Okay, so I looked through the interfaces file and everything looks fine. It's got one route on it for everything. The only thing that was new for me was a change I made to the DNS-Masq config in my /etc/network/interfaces file. It used to read:

That seemed to have done the trick and made my connection work.