iPlayer barely blinks if you hop servers mid-episode. Prime Video treats the same move like a break-in attempt, and after enough time bouncing between rentals in Lisbon, Bangkok, and Mexico City, troubleshooting that gap between the two has become the single most annoying part of being a remote worker who still wants her Amazon streaming library to behave like it does at home. The error is always the same flat sentence — connected via VPN or proxy, please disconnect and try again — and it doesn't matter whether you're staring at it from a phone propped on a hotel pillow or a laptop balanced on a kitchen counter three time zones from where your account thinks you live.
My flat in Graça has become the base between all that hopping around — a long wooden table holding two laptops, an ever-warm little travel router that's stayed plugged into the same power strip so long the plastic has gone slightly soft along one edge, and a row of sticky notes tracking which server most recently behaved itself with which app (the system is more aspirational than accurate). None of that setup matters to Amazon, though. It sees five thousand other travelers routed through the same address and shuts the whole IP down, regardless of how carefully you've organized the kitchen drawer of adapters and spare SIM cards next to it.
Prime Video Plays a Different Game Than Everything Else
That's a different failure than plain geo-blocking, where a service simply doesn't offer you a library at all — no error, no ruined evening, just a catalog that looks thinner than the one back home. Amazon's proxy message means something else entirely: it looked at the connection itself and decided it smelled wrong.
Deep Packet Inspection is the technical name for it — a process where the network peeks at metadata rather than content, checking things like packet timing and header patterns that tend to give VPN traffic away even through encryption. It's less a locked door than a bouncer working a private party, reading how you carry yourself as much as checking what's in your bag.
What Actually Counts as Looking Like a VPN?
It also pays attention to volume — if the same IP address is streaming the same show to thousands of different devices at once, Amazon shuts that address down regardless of who's actually behind any one connection. Switching servers rapidly doesn't get around that; hopping between locations every few minutes can trip its own separate alarms, whether or not the proxy check ever gets involved, and protocol choice plays into that too, which is something I get into in my Private Internet Access Review for Digital Nomads Needing Low Latency.
Before I landed on the fix that actually worked, I tried a Smart DNS service instead of a full VPN, on the theory that redirecting just the streaming traffic would be lighter and less likely to trip anything. It worked, for about two weeks — long enough that I stopped thinking about it — and then one evening Prime Video started throwing the proxy error again anyway, no warning, no changelog, nothing. That's the trouble with a workaround built on someone else's undocumented decision: it can vanish anytime, and you're left back at square one without knowing why it broke.
The Leak That Undoes the Whole Disguise
The actual leak, when I finally found it, had nothing to do with the VPN itself. My laptop's browser was still allowed to read GPS-level location data, and while the VPN told Amazon I was connecting from London, the browser was quietly telling the same page I was somewhere in Portugal — two contradictory answers arriving with the same request, which is roughly as suspicious as a passport and a boarding pass listing two different names.
Turning off location services system-wide solved most of it — once the browser has no GPS signal to leak, the VPN's version of events is the only one Amazon gets to hear. Opening Prime Video in a fresh private window helps too, since it stops the site from reading cookies dropped during an earlier session before the VPN was even switched on. Flushing the DNS cache is a smaller step (more housekeeping than magic), just clearing out the address book your computer keeps for sites it's already visited. And if none of that shifts anything, the account's own "home market" field — the country Amazon thinks you permanently live in, based on things like your original billing address — can sometimes be nudged to match your server, though that's a heavier-handed move than the rest, one I only reach for when everything else has failed. That last one is really region-spoofing at the account level rather than the connection level, a slightly different trick than whatever your VPN is doing underneath it.
Making a Server Choice and Sticking to It
Once I stopped chasing a perfect fix and just committed to one server for the length of a stay, the problem mostly disappeared. I picked a UK server and left it alone through a long stretch working out of the Graça flat, and by around week eight I'd stopped thinking about the proxy error entirely — I noticed it more by absence than anything dramatic, actually. I'd flicked over to Netflix out of habit while Prime Video loaded in the background, and the thumbnail grid filled in all at once, no proxy warning stalling it, no spinning wheel. That's usually how these things go. Not a lightning-bolt realization, just a slow stretch of things quietly working until you notice they've been working for a while.
Sorcha, who I catch up with most weeks over coffee at Largo do Intendente, asked the one question that actually mattered when I told her about it: was I sure the fix was the location settings, and not just that I'd happened to stop switching servers around the same time? I didn't have a clean answer. Both things had changed close together, and untangling cause from coincidence isn't always possible with a home setup this improvised.
None of this is the only way a VPN setup can go sideways while you're bouncing between flats, either — it just happens to be the one that throws that exact message. A dedicated IP solves a different headache altogether, the shared-address captcha loop rather than an outright block. Obfuscation hides the fact that you're using a VPN at all, which isn't the same problem as hiding which country you're in. Cramming more devices onto one subscription than the plan allows will hit a device limit that has nothing to do with proxies, and the ad-blocking some providers run at the DNS level is about stripping junk out of a page, not proving your location. There's a speed cost to routing everything through a server on the other side of the world too, and whether an app even behaves properly on a hotel's smart TV is its own separate platform compatibility question — public wifi encryption, meanwhile, is about keeping your login safe at the café counter, not about which streaming library you get to see.
A reader named Saoirse Devlin emailed me about this exact wording a while back, and working through it with her was easier than most of these exchanges usually are — she'd sent the precise error text and a screenshot in her very first message, which meant we skipped the usual back-and-forth of asking what the screen actually said. We went through the same location-services check over a couple of messages, and it turned out to be the same leak, just on a different laptop in a different country.
If there's one thing I'd tell anyone dealing with this specific error, it's to stop treating the VPN as the only variable. Check what else on the device is quietly telling the truth about where you are before you blame the server, the protocol, or the provider — the VPN can be doing its job perfectly and still get undercut by a browser setting nobody thought to check.