This morning, to my dismay, I found that my Private Internet Access (PIA) VPN had disconnected. It showed a little yield sign on the toolbar icon. A closer look at the panel showed me a note that maybe my account was disabled or expired.
I then logged on to PIA’s web site and verified that my account was just fine and wouldn’t be due for renewal for a few months yet.
- Checking Google yielded no results, neither did PIA’s own support knowledge base.
- Restarting the client didn’t help.
- My computer had recently been restarted so that was an unlikely candidate.
- Changing connection servers also didn’t help.
The solution, in my case, was to simply explicitly log out of the PIA app and then log back in. Now it’s working again like nothing happened.
I leave PIA on as a matter of course to ensure that ALL of my internet traffic is encrypted. I just like to be sure that nobody knows my business except me and the entities I’m dealing with. Nobody in between anyway.
I use PIA because it’s normally rock-solid reliable. I tried NordVPN’s trial and found it couldn’t even stay connected for a whole day at a time which wasn’t super useful to me.
PIA did a massive marketing campaign a few months ago which I thought was beneath them. Trying to scare everybody into renewing immediately for long term plans with super expensive (nearly triple) annual rates after that. I’m waiting to see what they want to charge me on my next renewal to see if I stick with them. They’ve been very good so far, it’s a shame if they get too greedy.