iPhone randomly dropped all internet connection after a few hours of being connected to Pi-hole with no issue.
I'm genuinely so confused and need some help.
A few weeks ago, we had some bad storms come through and knock power out a few times and I guess it screwed something up in the OS because the entire Pi would shutdown after like 3 minutes after start up. Whatever, long story short I got a new microSD and flashed the OS and redownloaded Pi-hole and Tailscale. It wasn't my first time using these together and had no issue before the power outage.
I got both Pi-hole and Tailscale set back up with ease, and is currently running well on the computer I am using to type this with no issue. I reconnected my phone back up to it as well, with no issues. I was able to interact with the Pi-hole panel from my phone, I added back some of the adlists I had from my phone while I was away from the computer.
After sitting at the computer all day with no issue, I realized my phone was strangely silent. I picked it up and realized that as I have been connected to the home wifi/tailscale, I haven't gotten a single bit of internet in house. There hadn't been a single query in the log from my phone in hours. Disconnected from the tailscale and reset my wifi's DNS back to automatic and I have internet again. I just can't figure out what could have happened in between now and then that changed and is preventing my phone from going through the pi-hole's DNS on the wifi or on data with tailscale.
I am however not entirely cut off from the internet, somehow. I can send/receive Telegram messages and I get Youtube notifications but I cannot watch the videos. Speedtest shows I have no internet when I try to run it, and the wifi itself in the settings of the phone shows no internet when the DNS is changed to the pi-hole's or tailscale is turned on.
Any help is appreciated.
Things I've tried:
- Flushing DNS cache (both with just turning airplane mode on, waiting 15 seconds, and turning it back off and turning airplane mode on, turning off the phone, then turning airplane mode back off)
- Turning Private Wi-Fi Address both to Fixed and Off
- Turning off Limit IP Address Tracking on both the wifi and in cellular data
- Making sure permit all origins is on.
- Making sure Private Relay is off (I don't even have access to it since I don't pay for iCloud+)
- Enabling IPv6 servers in the Upstream DNS Servers settings on the pi-hole
TLDR - Pi-hole/Tailscale are working, iPhone is not getting internet traffic after ~4 hours of working fine.
Posted Jul 9, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC