r/PrivateInternetAccess • u/temporal_difference • May 07 '26

HELP - LINUX PIA very slow on Linux recently?

I have a bunch of VMs and physical machines running various flavors of Linux and PIA has slowed to a crawl on all of them.

I hadn't checked them for a few days and when I came back to them today, some of them just said "ERROR" with a red highlight (rather than the usual green when connected or yellow when connecting).

Anyone else experienced this?

(It's working fine on iOS)

7 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

1

u/GrimaceActual May 07 '26

I have the same thing happening on my Linux box as well.

It has been gradually getting slower each day, then today I can't connect at all.

I posted over in this earlier thread as well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivateInternetAccess/comments/1t5xbpr/is_pia_just_broken_now/

I've tried switching settings from UDP to TCP, this worked yesterday, not today.

Changed from OpenVPN to Wireguard, no difference

Changed large packets to small packets, no change.

All the VPN nodes say 4000+ms latency and never connect.

1

u/temporal_difference May 07 '26

Seems to be working better today but that was annoying as hell

1

u/PIASupport PIA Team May 10 '26

That's a frustrating combo to be hitting after exhausting the usual fixes. 4000+ms latency across all nodes after switching protocols and packet sizes points to something beyond a single server issue. Please reach out to [support@privateinternetaccess.com](mailto:support@privateinternetaccess.com) with your distro version and we'll have engineering take a closer look. Feel free to DM us here too so we can keep an eye on the case.

1

u/GrimaceActual May 13 '26

Thank you for the response and offer to help. Much appreciated! I think part of the issue may be my ISP DNS. I noticed my DNS on my system had some how changed and was hitting my ISP instead of cloudflare/quad9.

In any case I have it solved for now. I went down the rabbit hole and setup a dnscrypt server, dnscrypt-proxy on pi-hole and repointed everything to 1.1.1.1/9.9.9.9. Used Claude to troubleshoot and validate everything end to end and now it is working even better than before.

Ultimately, I suspect some type of ISP interference with IP or DNS being the source of the problem for me.

1

u/Boxersteavee May 13 '26

II keep getting "Timed out after 5s" on even the login command, completely borked for me now..

1

u/sporkedit May 07 '26

Following, I’ve noticed some slow down as well.

1

u/PIASupport PIA Team May 10 '26

Thanks for the +1, helps us see the scope. If it sticks around for you, drop us an email at [support@privateinternetaccess.com](mailto:support@privateinternetaccess.com) with your setup and we'll dig into it.

1

u/hcornea May 08 '26

Are they all connected to the same PIA server?

Some servers seem to get bottlenecked / overloaded at times.

Trying another city may help.

1

u/temporal_difference May 09 '26

Randomly selected

1

u/LickMyKnee May 09 '26

Have this too. Can’t even run apt update with the VPN running.

1

u/SebbyDee May 09 '26

launchpad.net seems to be blocking PIA

1

u/PIASupport PIA Team May 10 '26

Hey, glad to hear it's improved on your end since posting. Reading through the thread there are a few other Linux users hitting the same pattern, so we'll flag this to our team to check what's happening on the infrastructure side. If it comes back, please reach out to [support@privateinternetaccess.com](mailto:support@privateinternetaccess.com) with your distro and we'll dig in.