My renewal for PIA is up soon and I’m thinking about not renewing unless I can get this fixed.
I have an issue with PIA on my macbook, where if I close the lid, when I come back to use it later on, sometimes PIA has crashed with an error message, when I open PIA from the bar at the top it is just spinning as if its trying to reconnect, meanwhile the internet is not working at all. If I close PIA completely, the internet still does not work, I re open PIA and it literally just spins again and doesn’t connect. The only way to get everything working again is to reboot my macbook, this happens usually once or twice a day.
I did notice when this happens, I was able to ping 8.8.8.8 but not google.com, so it does seem to be DNS related. Has anyone had this issue or know how to fix?
I’ve already contacted PIA support, they just told me to reinstall the software lol.
Sorry about that! We’re aware of it and we have engineers working on a fix right now. In the mean time you can downgrade to 3.3.1 which shouldnt have this issue, you won’t be missing any major features for now and we hope to have a fix in an upcoming release. You can get 3.3.1 from here: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/changelog
What I do is quit the PIA app, then use Activity Monitor to force quit “pia-daemon”. After that my computer is able to connect to the internet, and if I relaunch PIA app it will work too.
It’s annoying, but at least you don’t have to reboot your computer.
The Issue with the spinning circle persists in version 3.5.7. I’m using a 2019 16" Intel MacBook i9. A temporary workaround is to use the Activity Monitor to force quit “pia-daemon”.
[Edit] I took three attempts to connect after force-quitting the ‘pia-daemon’ process. During this, I also observed the send debug log. The initial two attempts failed, with the connection hanging at ‘Connecting.’ In the ‘Activity Monitor,’ I noticed two ‘pia-daemon’ processes. I then attempted to force quit ‘pia-wireguard-go,’ ‘pia-daemon,’ ‘Private Internet Access,’ and ‘com.privateinternetaccess.vpn.splittunnel.’ On the third try, an iCloud notification stated, ‘Private Relay unavailable incompatible system settings.’ finally, the PIA connection attempt was successful.
I have PIA as well and have an issue where I cannot log in to the desktop and mobile apps using my username and password.
I have to use the “log in with email link” functionality.
It’s irritating but it works. However, I have recently started using UnRaid and want to use PIA through WireGuard and it can’t authenticate me.
PIA support has been unable to help.
Edit: I can successfully log into my account on the PIA website using these credentials, just not the desktop and mobile apps (most recent versions of MacOS, iOS, iPadOS)
I have had the same issue for like 6 months. Here‘s my solution running M1 MacBook Pro: you will need to reinstall the helper part of the app. If that doesn’t make sense, you will have to reinstall the entire app. It sucks, I do this every other day after fighting with it for at least 5 mins. Best of luck…
I run a small bash script to kill the process and restart PIA because of this issue, it’s been bugging me for the past many months. Hoping they fix this soon as it’ll keep me from renewing.
