Did VPNArea just pull the rug on its customers?

Once in the running for the best VPN services, VPNArea has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, with users taking to Reddit to voice their concerns.

Even for VPNs, this is strange, especially from a once-respected provider. Normally we hear about shutdowns pretty early, but this came out of nowhere. I even had to double-take when I first saw the reports.

VpnArea Dead? from r/VPN

Alas, it appears to be true. VPNArea has either shut its doors without telling anyone or suffered the most brutal takedown I've ever seen in the industry.

One user claimed "I'm gearing up for the worst. Their entire online presence is down, website, servers and all. I'll give them another 24 hours before moving on. It's a shame since I've been with them since at least 2018 and never had any issues up until now."

To see for myself, I took to the WaybackMachine to check when it last recorded VPNArea's website. Surprisingly, it was last tweaked on May 29th, but Is It Down Or Just Me shows that it can't access the site whatsoever, and no amount of tweaking or geo-hopping on my end can bring it back, either – the site just times out due to a host error.

Normally that suggests that the servers are down. But, for the site servers and the VPN servers to both be down at the same time – that's a red flag.

VPNArea's last tweet was about Eid on the 15th of June and, just a day before, it was marketing its services toward businesses. There's a disturbing irony in the use of the word "trust" here. If you're thinking of using a business VPN, don't fall for this.

VPNArea alternatives

If you're one of the unfortunate souls who was using VPNArea, or if you narrowly dodged the bullet, don't get burned. Use a reliable and proven VPN service from one of the best providers around. It doesn't have to be expensive, even the best cheap VPN is both better and cheaper than VPNArea is – or at least was, I guess.

Try NordVPN – from $3.09 per month
NordVPN tops our charts for the best VPN on the market right now. With excellent security and apps that are easy to use, Nord isn't going anywhere – especially not without telling you. When AtlasVPN shut its doors, it transferred all of its users to Nord, too. Plus, at $3.09 per month, it still works out 25% cheaper per month than VPNArea.

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What happens next?

The bottom line is that people are rightfully angry. They've paid for a service that doesn't seem to be there anymore. Some are even considering banding together legally.

All the while, we've yet to see anything from VPNArea – not even a tweet (or whatever we're calling posting on their X feed nowadays).

Only time will tell, but this could be as damaging for the VPN industry as it is confusing and frustrating for VPNArea's customers.