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EMCE Help Center

Using EMCE with a VPN

Short version: EMCE does not officially support use with any Virtual Private Network (VPN) — consumer, corporate, school-issued, or otherwise. You are welcome to try, but you do so at your own risk.

If you are currently seeing a sign-in error, an “app malfunction,” or intermittent connectivity while connected to a VPN, please disconnect from the VPN and try again before contacting support. The overwhelming majority of VPN-related reports we receive are resolved immediately by doing so.

Why we don’t recommend using a VPN with EMCE

Section titled “Why we don’t recommend using a VPN with EMCE”

EMCE is a cloud-based application built on top of Google Cloud Platform and Firebase. Core functionality — signing in, loading your dashboard, documenting evaluations, uploading attachments, and receiving real-time updates — all depends on long-lived, encrypted connections to Google’s servers. Many VPNs interfere with those connections in ways we can neither detect nor control:

  • Authentication failures. VPNs route your traffic through shared IP addresses that are frequently flagged as suspicious by Firebase Authentication’s abuse-prevention systems and by our own app-integrity protections. This can produce sign-in errors, “app check failed” messages, or a temporary block on your account.
  • Broken real-time sync. EMCE uses streaming connections (HTTP/2 and gRPC) to keep your data up to date. Some VPNs silently drop or prematurely terminate these streams, which can make evaluations appear stale, attachments fail mid-upload, or the app appear “stuck” loading.
  • TLS interception. Some VPN providers intercept and re-sign encrypted traffic. This is incompatible with several of our security mechanisms and can produce errors that look like app bugs but are actually caused by the VPN rewriting traffic between you and Google.
  • Geographic routing. Exiting through a VPN server in another region or country changes which Google data center serves your requests, sometimes introducing enough latency for operations to time out before they complete.
  • Unpredictable behavior between providers. There are hundreds of consumer VPN services, each with its own apps, protocols (WireGuard, OpenVPN, proprietary), kill-switch behaviors, and DNS configurations. Behavior frequently changes from one update to the next, and we have no reasonable way to test against them.

We do not block VPN traffic, and EMCE may work perfectly well with your VPN today. However, because the conditions above can change without notice, we cannot guarantee continued compatibility, and we cannot treat VPN-related issues as defects in EMCE.

Symptoms that often indicate a VPN problem

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If you are experiencing any of the following, disconnecting your VPN is the first thing to try:

  • Sign-in errors such as “invalid credentials” or “app check failed” on your device, while other students or colleagues sign in without issue.
  • The app loads, but screens appear empty or spin indefinitely.
  • Evaluations, attachments, or signatures fail to save or upload.
  • You are repeatedly signed out.
  • Error messages referencing network timeouts, UNAVAILABLE, or DEADLINE_EXCEEDED.

If you choose to use a VPN anyway

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We understand that many users run a VPN for legitimate privacy, travel, or employer-mandated reasons. If you choose to do so while using EMCE, please be aware:

  • You assume the risk of any connectivity, authentication, or data-sync issues that result.
  • Our support team’s first request will almost always be to disconnect the VPN and retry.
  • We are unable to troubleshoot individual VPN providers, configurations, or protocols.
  • A “split-tunnel” configuration that routes EMCE traffic outside the VPN may resolve some issues, but the details depend on your VPN client and are outside the scope of EMCE support.

Corporate, hospital, or school networks

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If you are accessing EMCE through an organization-managed network — a hospital VPN, a school-issued device, a corporate proxy, Zscaler, or similar — this article still applies, but your IT team is the right point of contact. Please share our For IT Departments guide with them. That document lists the domains EMCE requires and covers common compatibility pitfalls with packet-inspecting proxies.

Still having trouble?

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If you have worked through the steps above with your VPN disconnected and are still experiencing issues, please contact our support team at requests@emce.help and include:

  • Your email address
  • The device and operating system you are using
  • A description of what you are seeing, including any error messages
  • The approximate time the issue occurred

Thank you,

The EMCE Engineering Team