UK age checks trigger a massive VPN surge

On 25 July 2025, new child safety duties under the UK’s Online Safety Act came into force, requiring any service hosting pornography or other age-restricted content to enforce « highly effective age assurance », such as photo ID checks or facial age estimation. Companies that fail to comply face fines of up to 18 million pounds, or 10% of their worldwide revenue.

Many users responded by trying to bypass the new checks altogether. Proton reported that UK sign-ups for its VPN service jumped by more than 1,400% as the deadline passed, before settling into a sustained increase of around 1,800% above normal levels in the days that followed.

Proton was not alone: NordVPN confirmed a spike of around 1,000% in purchases from UK users over the same period, and analytics firm Top10VPN measured UK VPN traffic rising by 1,327% on the day the law took effect, then climbing further, by almost 2,000%, two days later.

The surge was so large that Proton VPN briefly became the most downloaded free app on Apple’s UK App Store, overtaking even ChatGPT. Unlike previous spikes seen after similar restrictions elsewhere, this increase in VPN use has stayed high rather than fading away after a few days.

For regulators, the episode raises an awkward question: a law designed to protect children by verifying age online appears, at least so far, to have mainly pushed a large number of adult users towards tools that let them bypass identity checks completely.

Adapted from ITV News and Top10VPN data, July 2025