Bitly links suddenly won’t open on my iPhone, but they work fine on my laptop

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Level 1

36 points

Bitly links suddenly won’t open on my iPhone, but they work fine on my laptop

For some reason all of a sudden my iPhone will not open bitly links. The links work fine on my laptop. I have tried opening the link in different browsers. In Safari I get the first message below; in Chrome I get the second one. I have tried clearing the Safari cache, disabled cross-site tracking and restarted twice. No. pop up blockers being used.

I'm stumped.

[Edited by Moderator]

Original Title: Bitly links not working on iPhone

iPhone 16 Pro

Posted on Jul 30, 2025 4:27 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

davidra Author

Level 1

36 points

Jul 30, 2025 5:36 PM in response to MrHoffman

Yes…I had Nord VPN on the phone but not connected. After deleting I can now open the links. Thanks to all.

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Answer 2

MrHoffman

Level 10

149,885 points

Jul 30, 2025 5:24 PM in response to davidra

An add-on “coffee shop” VPN is one potential candidate. As suggested, remove all of those installed, as those VPN apps can potentially cause networking and routing problems even when the VPN is purportedly disabled.

Whatever is happening here, the DNS for this device is not resolving the server address. Whether that’s some VPN app involved, an ad-blocker or add-on security app, or some sort of local DNS filter is active on the current network, or the router has a DNS setup error, or the iPhone has a bad or malfunctioning local DNS configuration, or otherwise? If not the add-on VPN, concentrate on figuring out why the DNS is not returning an address.

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