Until last week, I have used Surfshark for a few years without problem. After the recent change that required me to switch to a new dedicated IP address, Surfshark no longer allows me to visit many different sites. One example is Reddit, but there are very few exceptions. I cant connect to Reddit using surfshark with dedicated IP or “fastest” IP. I have not tried them all but some NY Static IP’s allow me to connect. Having to get my new dedicated Ip whitelisted on all my endpoints was frustrating enough! Now not being able to connect might be the final straw. Note, I pay for the service and am not using a free account. Has anyone else experienced this?
Hey there, sorry to hear you’re having trouble accessing sites with Surfshark. Some small changes can really help with this issue. For example, changing the connection protocol or disabling CleanWeb in Settings → VPN settings in our app can fix this. If the issue persists, please contact our support team at [email protected].
Yes, I started using Surfshark late last year and then stopped early this summer even though I still have about 18 months left on my subscription. It just breaks too many web sites, and in ways that are hard to diagnose. For example, it makes Reddit pages sometimes not work — the page will load for ~30 seconds and then time out, or sometimes the page will “load” immediately but it’s just a blank page, and these problems will come and go throughout the day. It also frequently breaks logins to sites (it most recently stopped me from logging in to a vendor’s site to buy a pizza), though sometimes you can get around that by turning it off during the login process and then turning it back on afterward. And it’s straight out blacklisted on various sites — e.g. I couldn’t access Fextralife at all to see game wiki pages, and Amazon Prime Video blocks it.
Troubleshooting these problems can be extremely tricky since they’re intermittent and not necessarily consistent, so I didn’t realize right away that it was Surfshark causing all of them. It wasn’t until I added “turn off the VPN” to my troubleshooting that I realized it was the cause. I’ve tried the standard support recommendations about changing the VPN protocol etc and they haven’t worked, by the way, and I’m not optimistic about Surfshark support being able to help beyond that since they’ve given me clearly false information, e.g. claiming that Amazon prime video streaming should work with a VPN even though Amazon has a specific VPN error message if you access it while on Surfshark.
Making Reddit misbehave in such a weird and maddening way was the final straw, and now I only turn on the VPN occasionally and am actively looking for a different VPN that doesn’t break so much of the Internet.
CleanWeb has always been disabled. I have tried all three selections under protocol as well as “Automatic”, which did not change anything.