Exit node routing inconsistent on iPhone and Apple TV

[CicerBro]

Before posting

• I searched existing discussions and issues, including closed ones, and checked the relevant docs.
• I believe this is a product bug rather than a configuration or setup question.
• I can reproduce this issue, or for intermittent issues I've included trigger, frequency, and timing details below.
• I removed or anonymized sensitive data from logs, screenshots, and configuration.

Affected area

Mobile app, Routes / Exit nodes

Deployment type

NetBird Cloud

Operating system or environment

macOS, iOS

NetBird version and upgrade status

0.74.6 (iOS) and 0.74.7 (MacOS)

Did this work before?

Yes, this worked before

Regression details

No response

Summary

On both iPhone and Apple TV, exit node behavior appears broken as of today.

With an exit node enabled outside my home network, services like https://ifconfig.co still report my home IP about half the time after toggling the exit node, even though the node is in a remote datacenter. But this is very inconsistent.

Traffic either:

• Keeps using my home IP
• Correctly uses the exit node’s public IP (with a delay)
• Or stops flowing outside the Netbird overlay entirely

Enabling or disabling an exit node also often causes a ~10 second traffic blackout, even when the node shows a green vertical bar in the app.

[Update] It looks like this traffic blackout might actually be DNS not resolving through Netbirds DNS server on the 100.x subnet. I found a "Whats my IP" site that can be reached without DNS (http://65.108.151.63/) and this more or less works within 2-3 seconds of switching exit nodes. On Mac enabling a exit node also takes a few seconds to work, but meanwhile traffic flows over the normal LAN routes so that seems fine.

On iPhone, Force Relay was off if that matters.

Separately, the colored status indicator for each exit node doesn’t refresh until I leave the Resources tab and return. But sometimes it does... Very inconsistent behaviour. This may be related to: #6839

Update

Tested some more on Apple TV today. Basically whenever an exit node is being selected no network traffic can flow out of the LAN. It's not DNS related since I also cannot ping 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8. Disabling the exit node does not fix it, you need to completely disconnect from Netbird to restore normal traffic flow.

Essentially making the Apple TV app unusable.

iPhoneOS seems okay now. It's a bit slow toggling between exit nodes and sometimes the nodes color doesn't change between yellow/green without switching to another tab and back. But traffic works over IP and hostnames.

[UmbyUmbreon]

Possibly related to #6713?

[CicerBro]

Would be great if this could be converted into an issue.

[CicerBro]

Related/Dupe: #5799