Removing the support for forwarded ports

Today we announce that we no longer support port forwarding. New port forwards will no longer be supported, and existing ports will be removed 2023-07-01.

Why are we removing forwarded ports?

Port forwarding in general has added value if you are wanting to allow a friend or family to access a service running behind our VPN. This could be a legitimate website, a game server, or even access to your self-hosted server.

Unfortunately port forwarding also allows avenues for abuse, which in some cases can result in a far worse experience for the majority of our users. Regrettably individuals have frequently used this feature to host undesirable content and malicious services from ports that are forwarded from our VPN servers. This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.

The result is that it affects the majority of our users negatively, because they cannot use our service without having services being blocked.

The abuse vector of port forwarding has caught up with us, and today we announce the discontinuation of support for port forwarding. This means that if you are a user of forwarded ports, you will not be able to add or modify the ports you have in use.

We have removed the ability to add port forwards on all accounts.

What will happen now?

As of today we will remove the ability of adding ports to all accounts. 2023-07-01 we will remove all existings ports that are configured. Please update your services accordingly.

You will see a similar warning on the accounts page on our website.

Will you be affected?

If you do not know what port forwarding is, you will not be affected. The users that are directly affected are the users that have active ports and are using them through Mullvad as of today.