Why is Shadowsocks no longer available? – Surfshark Customer Support

Unfortunately, this had to happen. We are no longer supporting the Shadowsocks protocol since November 11th, 2021.

I know you are probably wondering why, and in this article, we will explain why we decided to discontinue the protocol, and what's next.

Shadowsocks is a free, open-source, encrypted proxy mainly dedicated to people living in territories with specific internet restrictions, like China. That being said, there is more than one reason why Shadowsocks has been disabled.

Only a tiny percentage of Surfshark users (0.5%) were using the Shadowsocks protocol. So we decided to better invest our resources in making sure other protocols are performing as well as they should.
As mentioned before, Shadowsocks is historically used by people in territories with internet restrictions. However, almost none of our customers that connect to servers near restrictive regions (most of our users choose the fastest server option) use the Shadowsocks protocol. All of our other protocols work just fine in those regions.
Most people using Shadowsocks would get a better connection using other available protocols like OpenVPN, or WireGuard.

If you have been using Shadowsocks, we can only apologize and recommend using other protocols we have to offer. We are even sure you will have a better connection using different protocols.