Mullvad shuts down its public encrypted DNS service and puts its weight behind Quad9

Swedish privacy company Mullvad has announced that it is shutting down its public encrypted DNS (DoH) servers, ending a service it has operated since 2022. The company said the move reflects the fact that the servers are largely redundant for its core audience: anyone using Mullvad VPN already has encrypted traffic and queries handled by the VPN's internal DNS. Outside of the VPN tunnel, however, the public servers have served as a standalone privacy service, something Mullvad now intends to provide by proxy, directing users to the Quad9 Foundation instead.

In the announcement, Mullvad framed the decision as a matter of focus rather than retreat, arguing that running a privacy-focused public DNS resolver is “a highly specialized undertaking” in which Quad9 is the undisputed leader. Rather than duplicating the nonprofit foundation's efforts only partially, the company says it will funnel the resources previously spent on its own resolvers into financially supporting Quad9. The move echoes a pattern familiar from Mullvad's history, such as its collaboration with the Tor Project on the Mullvad Browser, of partnering with established projects instead of building parallel infrastructure.

Users who relied on Mullvad's DoH service will need to act: manually configured setups must be migrated to Quad9 before November 2, 2026. Mullvad Browser users who kept the default DoH settings, or the built-in ad-blocking option, will be switched over to Quad9 automatically, though anyone with customized configurations will need to reset them manually. Existing iOS and macOS configuration profiles pointing at Mullvad's DNS servers will simply stop working, and the company is directing affected users to Quad9's own setup guides and replacement profiles for those platforms.