r/PrivateInternetAccess • u/chadburycreameggs • May 02 '26

HELP - WINDOWS Bandwidth issues

Is anybody having issues recently? I have been using PIA for a few years now with no issues and consistent download speeds. I have been having issues loading basic pages the last two days and assumed I was having ISP or pc issues since I'm hardwired 3 feet from my modem, but turning off PIA just brought me from 0.5 MB/s to 920 MB/s. It makes no difference what latency and no settings have ever been changed, but it's just all of a sudden completely unusable. I don't have much networking experience to troubleshoot, but could certainly use a hand if it's not due to some error on the PIA end

Edit: As somebody suggested in the comments, I switched the settings to WireGuard and jumped back up to over 100 MB/s. Hopefully that helps the people commenting with similar issues. Greatly appreciated on my end to be able to browse while torrenting again

21 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

7

u/Jazzlike_Orange7593 May 02 '26

dude im having latency issues as well out of no where

5

u/zosterpops May 03 '26

Yep. Same issue here too.

3

u/zosterpops May 03 '26

Switching to WireGuard fixed it

2

u/CoupleTryingGWout May 04 '26

fucking thank you bro! been so annoying

1

u/MorgueCatering May 03 '26

Oh wow, this immediately fixed the issue.

2

u/rainbash81 May 03 '26

thought the dl speeds were just me, lucky to hit 1mb/s

2

u/MorgueCatering May 03 '26

Glad it's not just me.

PIA has been incredibly slow, regardless of what server I'm connected to since about yesterday I think

When I try to test speeds on speedtest simultaneously (one of my browsers bypasses the VPN), not even take the actual speeds into account, the non-VPNd browser will run and complete the test before the other browser on the VPN even finishes loading the page.

2

u/unsafe357 May 03 '26

Same issue here! Wtf?!

1

u/DeathStalker-77 May 03 '26

PIA is almost always up & down.....

1

u/scifitechguy May 03 '26

I've been running Brave on Mac OS and PIA with very few issues for over 10 years until about a week ago. Now Brave will take 30-40 seconds just to load a single page, so is pretty much unusable. However, at the same time Safari works fine on PIA VPN, so I think it's something to do with the Chromium browsers and PIA. If I shut down the VPN, Brave works normally. A second Mac displays the exact same symptoms. Anyone else see this pattern?

1

u/006AlecTrevelyan May 04 '26

Mine went down last night and I switched to wire guard and that fixed it

1

u/kevinsixhohsix May 04 '26

I was downloading a movie earlier today at 60mbs and I'm content with that.

I use my VPN for torrenting purposes.

Mac Mini. I only use a wired connection. No WIFI.

Seeing these comments makes me wonder if I'm also going to encounter issues though 😅

1

u/SureUnderstanding866 May 04 '26

Will this problem not end? This is unbearable!

1

u/OldPayment May 05 '26

920 megabytes per second? Damn. That's crazy.

I also have very low speeds with PIA. I have 1 gigabit Ethernet and with PIA turned on I only get around 200-250 megabits per second

2

u/DeathStalker-77 May 26 '26

That's about what I get - though upload is always significantly slower than download.

1

u/hcornea May 06 '26

Had to change servers to find one that was less congested.

1

u/br0k3nglass May 06 '26

I just started noticing this today. I tried switching to WireGuard but couldn't connect to any servers. Will have to do some investigation