I Can’t Access Any Website While VPN Is Connected

Last modified: July 24, 2019

Your Internet connection works fine. Your VPN subscription is in order. Why is it then you can’t access anything on the Internet while the VPN is running?

There may be various reasons why this would happen. We will list the most common ones and address them in the following lines.

1. Verify that your Internet connection is working
2. Try connecting to a different server location
3. Change the VPN protocol
4. Test your DNS servers
5. Configure your anti-virus
6. Send us the diagnostics log file

Verify that your Internet connection is working

Disconnect your hide.me VPN client and try accessing the Internet.

If you cannot access the Internet, there is some kind of an issue with your Internet connection. You may need to reboot your computer to see if that fixes it.

If the Internet connection is working fine, then proceed to the next option and read on.

Try connecting to a different server location

From the client’s Location menu choose a different server location and try connecting to it.

In case you are able to access Internet while connected to this server location, there might be a routing issue or a temporary problem with the server location you chose originally. Please contact our Technical support about this issue.

Change the VPN protocol

VPN protocols are the underlying methods by which your traffic is communicated with our VPN server.

By deafult hide.me uses SoftEther VPN protocol. However, this protocol might be blocked in some countries or by some ISP’s.

To test if this is the case, go to the client’s Settings and change the VPN protocol to other available. Preferably choose: OpenVPN, IKEv2 or SSTP.

If this is not possible within our VPN client app (e.g. on iOS), use our VPN setup tutorials here to configure a different VPN protocol.

Change your DNS servers

Switch the DNS servers from your Internet service provider ones to a third-party ones.

In some cases ISP’s are known to poison DNS records and thus block access to network addresses they seem unfit.

Change your DNS servers to: 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 to see if that is the case.

You can find detailed instructions on this link.

Configure your anti-virus

Your security applications might be blocking our VPN client app.

Temporarily snooze your protection or whitelist our VPN client app in your anti-virus application. Also, disable the “Scan SSL” option if you have any as it breaks the consistency of VPN packets.

Send us your diagnostics log file

Other possible causes and solutions might be found by inspecting your VPN client’s log file.

Go to the client’s Settings and Support tab. There you will have the option of describing your problem and attaching log files by submitting a support ticket.

Find out what the log file errors mean (here).