Wednesday, March 11, 2020

In the coming days, we will be carrying out maintenance work in order to improve performance, reliability and security of our service. 
The maintenance involves an upgrade and patching of OpenVPN services on the servers side, addressing performance and reliability (high impact), but also security (low impact). All maintenance tasks will be carried out during the lowest server usage times for each regions (e.g. early morning time in USA for US servers) in order to minimize impact on the clients side. 

Expected impact: existing OpenVPN connections will be dropped for a brief period while the OpenVPN services are restarted and existing connection re-established, automatic reconnection being expected to occur within 2-3 minutes. A manual disconnect/connect process should occur immediately/within seconds. 

Current status: 

20/03/2020 19:00 UTC: most servers in US and Europe have been updated, but we are postponing mass restarting of services due to traffic increase during non-peak hours. It will be done gradually next week depending on actual load for each server. 
13/03/2020 22:20 UTC: maintenance finished on all servers in SG, HK. Full maintenance on Asia-Pacific servers has been finished without issues, on schedule. 
13/03/2020 21:35 UTC: HK servers maintenance finished. SG servers currently under maintenance 
12/03/2020 20:00 UTC: completed on all AU, JP, TW servers - HK and SG servers scheduled for tomorrow, 13/03

Schedule:

12/03/2020: preparations on servers side for all upcoming changes (no downtime expected): IN PROGRESS
12-13/03/2020: roll-out changes on VPN servers in the Asia-Pacific region first (short downtime expected / service reconnections). Other regions to follow: IN PROGRESS (started at 16:30 UTC on 12/03)

The maintenance applies to OpenVPN only, all others (IPsec, SecureProxy, WireGuard) won't be affected. 
This announcement and the status page will be updated accordingly, when maintenance is in progress. 

Quick FAQ: 

Does it have serious security/privacy implications? 
No. Even though this is a short notice maintenance, there are no serious issues in terms of security and privacy that are being addressed. So there is nothing to worry about on this regard. Security/privacy benefits of the actual update are minimal. 

What is the main purpose of the update? 
The update addresses performance and reliability of OpenVPN connections. Recently we discovered a bug which results, in some scenarios, in packet loss (loss of reliability) for a very short time.