Yes, I did a search but nothing relevant showed up. Every time I turn on my TV/Firestick, the screen displays an error message from VPN Monitor Dot - “Connection error when checking for update”. No updates are available and I’m not aware that this issue started until well after the last app update. It’s not app dependent and it also shows up randomly when watching live TV from my Recast or streaming an app over the internet.
I’m surprised no-one else has reported this issue. It happens at two locations on two different accounts with at least 3 firesticks/TVs.
I have the same thing happening on my 2nd Generation Fire TV Cube; OS 7.6.6.9 Don’t know why it happens. I certainly can’t get it to upgrade. The dot seems to work fine. Thankfully it doesn’t happen that often so we live with it. I don’t remember when it started–maybe 2-3 weeks ago. Happened a lot at first and then only once this week.
That error indicates that something (an ad-blocking app, your router) is blocking the Monitor Dot app from accessing the website monitordot.com to check for an update.
Once you fix the reason why it can’t access monitordot.com, then the warning will go away.
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That would be SurfShark, in my case. It’s only started happening in the last 6-8 weeks - never happened before. Has there been an update in that time period that calls the mothership and is throwing the error?
When you manually start Monitor Dot, it will report that error right away if it’s unable to load the homepage in the app.
Otherwise, it wont show that error unless it failed to connect after many auto-update check attempts/days - so something is blocking the connection.
No update/change has been made in the last 6+ months.
Interesting. I never get the error on manually starting VPNmonitordot but it will interrupt a video periodically when, I guess, it’s calling home for an update. Maybe the next version can have a setting to turn off auto-update?
Let me elaborate a little…
When you manually run the app, it will normally immediately do an update check and display the homepage on the main screen of the app. If it’s not able to connect to it’s website to check for an update right when you manually start the app, it will immediately display that error message.
However, it also does a periodic background check for updates and if it can not connect right away, it will NOT immediately display an error message. The only time it displays an error message (most probably on top of something else you are currently doing) is after it was unable to connect for many days/times and it finally gives up and displays an error message.
Also, lets say it failed 15 times in the background, and then on the 16th attempt it succeeds, it will reset the fail counter back to 0 so it will again take many MORE failed attempt before displaying the error message. So something is definitely wrong and preventing the app from connecting to the site consecutively after many days/attempts by allowing the fail count to get very high without at least one successful connection in all those attempts.
So, it doesn’t make sense that you never get the error when you manually run the app, but yet it blocks the connection for many attempts/days in the background.
I had this issue a few weeks ago. I deleted the app and tried to install it using TO Toolbox but when I clicked to download nothing happened. And I could not connect to the monitor dot website on a browser or using Downloader. I gave up and tried a few days later when everything worked. I get the message from time to time but I now just ignore it.
I have a third-party monitoring service that pings the website every few minutes and reports if it goes down and it reports the website has had 100% uptime for months now.
By any chance did you have a VPN on while trying to us TO or Downloader? Maybe the VPN thinks that the monitordot.com is an ad website and needs to be whitelisted some how.
I tried it with and without VPN - same problem. Curiously I could access the monitordot website from Safari on my iPad but no browser on my Firestick could do so. Very strange but no
Big deal because it worked in the end