Starting a few days ago my Prime Video stopped working with the error message:
Your device is connected to the Internet using a VPN or proxy service. Please disable it and try again. For more help, go to primevideo.com/vpn.
except … I’m not. I’m not on a shared network either, and my IP address is (mostly) static. As in it hasn’t changed in >6 months, but theoretically it could. I contacted amazon through live chat and they basically told me they’d forward it on to the tech people and it might start working in 48 hours or so. I’m not hopeful. They refused any compensation despite ruining my plans to kick back on the only real break I’ll have for months.
They refused any compensation despite ruining my plans
If it were me, I’d wait 48 hours and insist they agree to a refund for every day service is denied for as long as it takes them to realize they screwed up. If they refuse, then I’d tell them I’m issuing a chargeback for breaking their agreement with me, that I’ve followed their rules and they have not.
Sure they’ll drop me as a customer, but I won’t be treated like a thief.
I think that’s the crux of it, honestly. I can forgive a system outage or technical error, shit happens, but they are using a bogus algorithm as a proxy to accuse me of being dishonest.
This is the real danger of letting software make serious decisions. I don’t know how advanced their supposed VPN detection system is, but it’s obviously flawed. Amazon of all people should be able to get this right and yet here we are. Glad it’s only taken my prime video offline and isn’t deciding if I’m a legitimate target for a drone strike.
Hmm I know that amazon is hunting VPN servers so other people like me can’t access content from other region, but hearing that they ban home IP, is strange.
Have you tried use other service like Netflix ? if it is working it must be Amazon VPN system error and you can’t do anything just wait. If not maybe your ISP is in some sort of black list but I doubt.
I get what you’re saying but honestly having to “just wait” for Amazon to decide that I’m not breaking their ToS while still collecting money from a service that I’m paying for isn’t really acceptable.
My ISP is the second largest in the country, so it’s unlikely the whole ISP is blacklisted. Their detection algorithm is faulty and should never have been deployed unless they had a proper process in place to manage false positives. The help page tells consumers to contact their ISP if turning off their proxy/VPN doesn’t work. They’re shamelessly passing the blame to the ISP, who can do nothing to fix the issue in most cases, and the average user wouldn’t know any better. There is no mention whatsoever to contact them as their system may be at fault.
Hopefully they fix it properly for me so it doesn’t happen again but it really should never have happened it the first place. Poor form, Amazon. Very poor form.
…ironically I could probably use a VPN to get around being blocked by their VPN blocking service.
Yeah I know it is not fair. However, it always happens everyone hates to admit that is their fault. I remember then I have fought with my 4G ISP because ping was too big and I couldn’t use internet at all even though my speed was 40Mb/s. First they have told me to reset modem, but I had already done that and said that is their cell tower fault, but they didn’t believe. It took them about 2 weeks to fix this problem and I was right that their cell tower was broken, but at the end I didn’t get any compensation for my wasted time.
Any chance you ever got around this Amazon VPN problem?
I’m in your same scenario, not actually using VPN except on my work laptop where I don’t watch Prime. It’s been happening to me for a few weeks now on all my devices. Other services are fine.
Not really, I believed their algorithm was detecting a web server instance I was using for testing on port 8080. I confirmed it was appropriately locked down and wasn’t able to actually be used as a proxy but I suspect the method I was using to dump anyone attempting to proxy through it may have been triggering their system somehow.
Regardless, I killed it temporarily for a week and was still blocked so I went to the effort of getting a new IP address issued and the problem went away. I can’t be sure if it was ever involved but I’m still running my test server on my new IP address and haven’t had any issues.
Nearly after one week , i was able to resolve the issue by my self , i use tplink m9 mesh & two 8 gig switch boards , I turned off them and waited for 5 mints unpluged all cables from switch baords as well, my isp had issue with bad blocks near my area on netflix users but it effected to me on prime vidoes somehow i recived the bad packets data to my home address as well , after that turned on just one mesh device made setting to static ip address from dynamic ip . Notting worked ( not even internet😅) and then reveret back to orginal setting to dynamic ip back got the internet back and even tired to watch prime videos on my smart phone through wifi network , seems like bad blocks were removed . And then turrned on other meshs and swicth baords , all the devices started to play the prime vidoes . If any one gets same issue , may try to follow these steps if your ISP is not resetting your IP address .!!!
