Is My VPN Working?

A VPN leak is anything that reveals your real location or identity while a VPN is connected. The tunnel can be carrying your traffic correctly and still leak: WebRTC can hand a website your address directly, your system may resolve DNS outside the tunnel, and your timezone and browser language are set locally and never travel through the VPN at all.

WebRTC is a browser feature for real-time audio, video and data. To connect two peers it asks your system for candidate IP addresses, and a website can read those with a few lines of JavaScript. That bypasses the VPN entirely, because it is the browser querying your network stack rather than traffic going through the tunnel. If the address it reports is not your VPN's exit IP, that is a leak.

Neither travels through the VPN. Your timezone comes from your operating system's clock settings and your locale from your browser's language preference, so both keep describing where you really are while your IP says otherwise. A site seeing a Tehran timezone on a Frankfurt IP has a strong hint that the IP is not your real location. Neither is proof on its own - travellers and people living abroad produce the same mismatch legitimately.

Every site you open starts with a DNS lookup that turns a name into an address. If those lookups go to your internet provider's resolver instead of through the tunnel, your provider still sees every domain you visit even though the traffic itself is encrypted. A DNS leak cannot be detected inside the browser, which is why our DNS test asks your resolver to look up a name only you have been given and records which server actually arrives.

First confirm that the IP shown here belongs to your VPN provider rather than to you. If it does and a check still fails, the usual fixes are to turn on your VPN's leak protection or kill switch, block WebRTC in your browser or with an extension, and switch to the VPN's own DNS servers. If the IP shown is your own, the tunnel is not carrying your traffic at all and the VPN app is the place to look.

No. The timezone and locale checks read values from your browser and the results are never sent to us. The WebRTC check contacts a public STUN server to discover candidate addresses, which is how WebRTC works, but the result stays in your browser. The DNS leak test is the only check that reaches our servers: the resolver addresses it observes are held in memory for five minutes, are never written to our request logs, and are never shown to anyone else.