Proton has announced that it now runs over 11,000 VPN servers in over 110 countries. The news comes as demand for VPN services continues to increase, largely due to more internet censorship.
Proton said in a blog post, “As Proton VPN expands, the usage from our growing community has put additional pressure on our server infrastructure. Adding more servers reduces the average server load, ensuring a better and more reliable service for everyone. Servers in more countries gives you greater choice, but also makes it easy to connect to a location near you. Again, closer servers results in faster connection speeds.”
The company is also upgrading its servers with 10 Gbps+ connections, and Proton now operates over 2,000 free servers in five countries, “which is up from 266 in three countries a year ago.” Proton also highlighted other recent additions, such as the new Apple TV app, improved compatibility with streaming services, Stealth protocol and ARM support for its Windows client, and WireGuard and IPv6 support on Linux.
Proton’s continued growth is, at least in part, a response to increased internet censorship across the world. Freedom House, an organization that tracks threats to democracy and human rights, reported that “global internet freedom declined for the 14th consecutive year.” VPNs are often effective in bypassing sites and services blocked by internet service providers, and ProtonVPN offers a ‘Stealth’ protocol intended to disguise VPN traffic as normal web traffic. Some other VPN providers have similar features.
In the United States, the national ban on TikTok created a massive spike in downloads for VPN services, even though they ended up not being effective. In the top free apps charts in the US Apple App Store, no-name VPN services are currently placed at number 15 and 75, though they were higher during the TikTok ban. Web searches for “VPN” in the US massively spiked at the start of 2025, when more states’ laws about ID requirements for certain sites went into effect.
Proton said in a blog post, “In June 2024, we announced offering 5,000+ VPN servers in over 90 countries worldwide, already making us one of the largest and most popular VPN services in the world. We’re excited to say that just seven months later, we now offer 11,000+ VPN servers in over 110 countries and counting.”
It’s great to see Proton and the other best VPN services continue adapting to the growing demand, but the changes causing those usage surges are concerning. Some countries also officially ban or limit the use of VPNs, with limited success, and the new US administration (or individual states) could try that in the future.
Source: Proton
