Will Firestore support access through VPNs?

[Thijs Koerselman]

We occasionally have clients reporting that our application is not working for them. The issue always seem to be related to VPNs.

In order to narrow down the problem we've created a troubleshooting page that prints some user info like IP and timestamp, and performs a bunch of tests to see if data is accessible.

To test both types of connections (with and without long-polling) we instantiate two separate clients with different settings simultaneously. It then fetches documents with and without access rules.

As you can see in the screenshot the user can assess Firebase storage, but not the database.

Until now we've been telling our clients "use a different network / turn off your VPN" but that's not a very satisfactory answer. As VPNs are becoming more common and some companies might require the use of a VPN for security or other reasons, we want our app to work with VPNs.

What are the known issues preventing access? Is this something that's being worked on / planned to be supported in the future?

It would be nice to be able to explain the problem better to our customers at least.

When I enable my Windscribe VPN I also can not access the Firebase console page. It tells me "There was an unknown error while processing the request."

Best,
Thijs