Incident report: 20 December 2025

In the afternoon (UTC) of 20 December 2025, users began experiencing connectivity issues with NymVPN. Apps across platforms were unable to connect to gateways on the network, showing the following error: “Can’t reach exit server. Try another!” This was caused by unexpected downtime of the Nym network monitor.

Thanks to community member notifications in the Telegram Support channel, the Nym team was able to quickly identify the problem.

🕒 Timeline of events

• Around 14:45 (UTC): Users begin reporting connection issues
• 14:55: Nym operations made aware of the problem
• 15:13: Source of problem uncovered in network monitor
• 15:26: NymVPN users notified of problem
• 16:20–16:40: Network monitor redeployed and team & community verify app connections

Total resolution time: 1 hour, 35 minutes

🔍 Root cause

• Although the nodes in the Nym network are decentralized and run by many operators, the account management and payments aspects of NymVPN are a centralized service run by Nym. The network monitor is one tool which allows Nym to monitor and troubleshoot performance across nodes and authenticate access credentials (zk-nyms).
• The network monitor went down temporarily and was unable to authenticate zk-nyms. This blocked users’ apps from accessing the endpoints of the network and connecting to NymVPN.
• Once redeployed manually, which took approximately 40 minutes for the monitor to probe the entire network, normal NymVPN services resumed.

🛠️ Improvements & next steps

• Extra alerts are being added to the infrastructure that runs the centralized API services so that the operations team can better manage the network monitor and other tools.
• Plans are in process for further decentralizing network infrastructures so that critical functions like authentication can occur even in the event of downtime from the centralized API services. This is projected for early 2026.