Yesterday evening and this morning none of the VPN servers were accessible from my iPhone. Bitdefender VPN kept on trying to connect to the server and severely slowed down access to my ISP. As soon as I turned off VPN access was restored, and when I enabled VPN at noon it was working again. I suggest that VPN automatically disable itself when the servers are down, and display a message to that effect. It should at least pop-up a message saying that there's a problem accessing the server. I had assumed that it was an ISP problem but I now know to check the VPN connection when things slow down, but it caught me by surprise as the VPN servers have been reliable up to yesterday.
Thanks.