# Imports with VPN

**URL:** <https://talk.observablehq.com/t/imports-with-vpn/10798>\
**Category:** Help\
**Created:** [September 3, 2026, 7:33pm UTC](https://talk.observablehq.com/t/imports-with-vpn/10798 "2026-09-03T19:33:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![zachbogart](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/talk.observablehq.com/zachbogart/32/8597_2.png) [@zachbogart](https://talk.observablehq.com/u/zachbogart)\
**Post date:** [September 3, 2026, 7:33pm UTC](https://talk.observablehq.com/t/imports-with-vpn/10798/1 "2026-09-03T19:33:03Z")

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Why might the imports fail when running on a VPN? For example, [Notebook imports](https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/notebook-imports) notebook examples fail with

TypeError: Failed to fetch dynamically imported module: [https://observablehq.com/api/import/@mbostock/random-hex-string](https://observablehq.com/api/import/@mbostock/random-hex-string)

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**Author:** ![mbostock](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/talk.observablehq.com/mbostock/32/9_2.png) [@mbostock](https://talk.observablehq.com/u/mbostock)\
**Post date:** [September 3, 2026, 8:36pm UTC](https://talk.observablehq.com/t/imports-with-vpn/10798/2 "2026-09-03T20:36:43Z")

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Edit: disabling Vercel’s bot protection on the import API endpoint seems to have fixed the problem.

Hi @zachbogart, thanks for the report.

We’re not entirely sure what would cause these requests to fail on a VPN (and which network conditions, VPN providers, or browsers trigger the issue). Any further details to reproduce would be appreciated.

One hypothesis is that these requests are sometimes somehow triggering Vercel’s bot protection rules (perhaps because they are cross-origin requests to [observablehq.com](http://observablehq.com) and aren’t sent with cookies). We’ve therefore disabled bot protection for these routes (at least for now). Please let us know if you continue to see an issue.

We will probably move these routes to another home in the near future — likely to make them a same-origin request on [observableusercontent.com](http://observableusercontent.com). This might help too. We’ll see. Thanks for your patience! Software is hard!

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**Author:** ![zachbogart](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/talk.observablehq.com/zachbogart/32/8597_2.png) [@zachbogart](https://talk.observablehq.com/u/zachbogart)\
**Post date:** [September 4, 2026, 6:59pm UTC](https://talk.observablehq.com/t/imports-with-vpn/10798/3 "2026-09-04T18:59:22Z")

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Updates now resolve imports, works well.

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**Author:** ![system](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/uploads/observablehq/original/2X/8/8515fb2ace542ad82412d6c45906339e74f2053f.png) [@system](https://talk.observablehq.com/u/system)\
**Post date:** [September 6, 2026, 6:59pm UTC](https://talk.observablehq.com/t/imports-with-vpn/10798/4 "2026-09-06T18:59:50Z")

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