So basically I have Mullvad VPN on my pc and phone and only on those devices. Recently I had an issue with ordering from subway on a tablet (that is not on a VPN) where I would get a message that I was blocked from visiting that site. Could access the site from my pc (with the VPN, but not without) Kinda wrote it off as some weird one off occurrence and didn’t think much further into it.
Now yesterday my WatchFree+ (free live tv) on a Vizio smart tv stopped working (it would boot me out to HDMI1 almost instantly). Tried accessing the site on my pc (vpn enabled) and got that same message as when visiting subway. Turned off my vpn and was able to connect to the site without issue. I then tried WatchFree+ on the tv while my pc’s VPN was disabled and all of a sudden it works again.
Why would a device with VPN enabled be affecting devices that do not have VPN enabled?
Potentially related side note: I was banned from SteamDB (quite a while ago) when I was using Nord VPN due to data scraping (don’t even know what that is). Recently (on Mullvad) I also got a 10 minute timeout from Nexus Mods due to, I believe it was, high network traffic, which the error message said was DDoS protection. Not sure if these are related, but it seems like very odd network issues have been occurring ever since I started using VPN’s.