Could my VPN be restarting my router?

[ASWprime]

I have tried and tried and I cannot find the source of my router crashing anywhere from 1 to 4 times a day. I have a Netgear Nighthawk r6700(v3) that is about a year and a half old, I have a Verizon gigabit fiber connection, and I use Private Internet Access. When it crashes three or four lights in the middle of the router turn solid white with all the other lights off for about a second and then seemingly shuts off completely. It then boots back up and sometimes seemingly goes through many power cycles over several minutes. This happens in a few scenarios and is not consistent at all, sometimes one of these things will trigger the router to crash, other times it will not.

• Turning on PIA and attempt to connect
• Powering on any one of the three PCs that I have connected via ethernet to a switch that runs to the router or directly to the router itself
• Switching PIA to another region
• While LEGALLY torrenting
• Randomly for seemingly no reason

I've been troubleshooting this for months and have tried all of the following:

• Giving the router its own outlet (it was previously plugged into a very busy power strip)
• Moved its position for fear it was overheating
• Keep firmware up to date (I do this manually, I do not have my router set to auto-update)
• Factory reset the router
• Changed the default DNS twice
• Power cycled it more times than I can count
• Got rid of high bandwidth use start up programs

Also the router logs have been no help as they just seem to treat the disconnect as a power-cycle and start over when I look at them afterwards. I'm at my wit's end with this shit but I think I have it narrowed down to it being the VPN due to how much it seems to crash in situations surrounding it, or it may be a hardware issue. In either case, is it possible that PIA is the cause? Is there a background service on startup that is causing it? Is it something else entirely? Please if you have any idea, let me know and thank you so much in advance.

[BrushyYT]

No your router shouldn't be crashing because of an vpn but it might be over heating.

[ASWprime]

2 minutes ago, BrushyYT said:

No your router shouldn't be crashing because of an vpn but it might be over heating.

Any fix other than strapping a fan to it?

[BrushyYT]

is your router near a window/sun

[ASWprime]

2 minutes ago, BrushyYT said:

is your router near a window/sun

 

[beersykins]

Does it experience the same issue if you yank power and reapply, going through a few boot cycles, or is it different?

 

That might isolate hardware (same) versus firmware/software (different).

 

To your router, your VPN is just another packet.  I assume you just run the client on your PC and don't have a peering tunnel directly from the router, correct?

[ASWprime]

6 hours ago, beersykins said:

Does it experience the same issue if you yank power and reapply, going through a few boot cycles, or is it different?

 

That might isolate hardware (same) versus firmware/software (different).

 

To your router, your VPN is just another packet.  I assume you just run the client on your PC and don't have a peering tunnel directly from the router, correct?

It does actually, good idea on that. From what I have seen on other platforms that I posted this question on there have been some instances of what I have experienced. Yeah I run the client on my PCs rather than my router. I'm gonna replace it at this point, I've wanted to do a mesh setup for a long time anyways. Thanks for the reply!

[Jinu]

There might be one more thing you could try, since you already have tried a lot. Switch out the power adapter if you can. This could be a sign of your power adapter failing and not able to provide ample current required by the router at high load. I had a similar issue with a Dlink router some time back.. random rebooting. was finally resolved by replacing the power adapter of the router with a new one.