When Malta Lost Power and Fibre, the Best VPN Was the One I Could Start in Minutes

The apartment went dark while I was uploading the final pricing sheet. My laptop battery showed 17 percent, the client launch call began in fourteen minutes, and the router had disappeared with the electricity. I enabled my phone’s hotspot. No mobile data. After two restarts, I blamed the phone, carried the laptop outside and walked toward a public Wi-Fi hotspot two streets away. Its splash page loaded. The client dashboard did not.

What felt like a string of unrelated failures was, in fact, happening across the island.

During Malta’s July 2026 heatwave, temperatures reached a July record of 43.3°C as power cuts affected Valletta and numerous other localities. Enemalta attributed the failures to distribution faults caused by extreme heat and record electricity demand.1

At almost the same time, roadworks near Msida Creek damaged part of Melita’s fibre backbone. Internet, mobile, television and business connections were disrupted across affected areas, leaving thousands without their normal service.2

For residents, the outages meant heat, spoiled food and uncertainty. For visitors working from rented apartments, they also removed the router, the backup connection and the place where the workday was supposed to happen.

That group was not small. Malta recorded 458,223 inbound tourists in June 2026, up 18.5 percent from the previous year. Almost nine in ten guest nights were spent in rented accommodation rather than traditional hotels.3 An apartment guest does not necessarily have a hotel generator, a business centre or an IT desk downstairs.

I had a public hotspot, a shrinking battery and thirteen minutes.

The best VPN for Malta, in that moment, was not the one with the longest server list. It was the one I could get running before the connection disappeared again.

The trusted provider turned protection into a registration task

I began with the large VPN company whose name I already recognised.

The choice made sense. It had years of public history, a large support operation and more reviews than the smaller services I had considered. I downloaded its app over the public Wi-Fi and expected to press a button.

Instead, I entered an onboarding sequence.

First came the account form. Then a password with several requirements. Then an email confirmation. Then the subscription page. By the time the verification message arrived, the public hotspot had disconnected and returned me to its splash page.

I accepted the Wi-Fi terms again, reopened the VPN and found myself back at the sign-in screen.

From a sofa with stable broadband, the process might have taken three minutes. In the square, it had consumed six.

The client dashboard was still closed because company policy prohibited administrative work over public Wi-Fi without an active VPN. The revised pricing sheet remained on my laptop. The client had begun sending question marks in the meeting chat.

I tried once more.

The account now existed, but the app asked me to choose a plan and then a server. Italy looked close. France looked reliable. Germany showed a lower load percentage. Any of them might have worked, but none answered the immediate question: which button would let me upload the file now?

I selected Italy.

The connection began, paused and returned an error after the hotspot reset again.

That was the point when the comparison changed. Brand history and server coverage still mattered, but only after a more basic requirement had been met: the service had to become usable before the network vanished for the third time.

People affected by the Melita outage described starting the workday without Wi-Fi, mobile service or a reliable support channel, with lost business becoming the immediate concern.4 My situation was slightly better—I had found a connection—but I was spending its useful minutes creating an account rather than finishing the work.

The smaller app opened without asking who I was

The second app was OnlydogVPN^↗.

It had fewer ratings and a shorter public history. Under ordinary circumstances, those facts might have placed it below the established provider on my list.

With seven minutes left, the opening screen mattered more.

The app did not require an email address or conventional password before basic use. It opened directly to situation-based choices. I selected the preset for an unstable public network.

The connection formed.

I returned to the client dashboard. The sign-in page opened, the authentication prompt completed and the campaign workspace appeared.

I uploaded the pricing sheet.

The progress bar moved through 25 percent, 60 percent and 100 percent. I opened the launch settings, replaced the old document and pressed Approve.

The client’s message arrived a few seconds later.

“Got it. Going live.”

That was the first attempt that completed the job I had left the apartment to do. The established provider had offered more locations and a longer reputation. The smaller app had removed the account creation, verification and server-selection decisions between me and the upload.

In an emergency connection, onboarding was not separate from performance. It was the first performance test.

Public Wi-Fi gave me access, not stability

The hotspot itself was part of a broad public network. The Malta Communications Authority has installed more than 400 free Wi-Fi connections across Malta and Gozo, serving thousands of daily users in public spaces.5

That made it a valuable fallback during an outage. It did not make it behave like a private office network.

Before any VPN could connect, the browser had to pass through the local splash page. Each time the hotspot reset, that process began again. The smaller app fitted naturally after it: accept the Wi-Fi terms, choose the unstable-network preset and return to work.

More importantly, it did not add another account portal on top of the public Wi-Fi portal.

That difference became useful again before the client call ended.

As more people gathered in the square, the connection weakened. My video froze, the audio broke into fragments and the Wi-Fi icon disappeared.

At almost the same moment, mobile data returned on my phone.

I enabled the hotspot and moved the laptop across.

The VPN paused, recovered on the new connection and kept the session alive. The client’s voice returned before I had to sign in again. The dashboard remained open, and the confirmation screen still showed the revised pricing sheet as approved.

The urgent task had already succeeded, but this second result explained why I kept the app installed after the electricity returned.

During an outage, “the internet” is rarely one stable connection. It is a sequence: apartment Wi-Fi, public hotspot, café network, mobile data and perhaps another provider’s SIM. A service that makes the user restart everything at every handoff turns each backup into another failure point.

The app’s HTTP/3-based transport is designed to recover across changing network paths. The practical result required no longer explanation: the public Wi-Fi dropped, the phone took over and the call continued.

I could not inspect either network’s internal rules or determine precisely why the established app failed whenever the public hotspot reset. I could see the difference in the workflow. One service returned me to registration and server selection. The other returned me to the client.

The first working minute changed the comparison

The established provider still had advantages the smaller app could not reproduce overnight. It had accumulated more independent reviews, a longer operating history and a broader support organisation. The second service also offered fewer server locations.

Those limitations mattered less in this particular failure because I did not need a specialised country route.

I needed to protect a laptop on public Wi-Fi, reach a client dashboard and remain connected when the only usable network changed. Every registration form, verification message and server decision stood between the outage and that result.

The July disruptions made that standard unusually relevant. Malta’s power cuts pushed people into shops, cars and public spaces to charge devices or escape the heat. The damaged fibre line showed that home internet and mobile service could fail together. Under those conditions, a backup tool earns its place by becoming useful before the next interruption arrives.

The large provider had the stronger résumé. It spent most of my remaining time asking me to establish an account and choose a route.

The smaller app opened anonymously, connected from the public hotspot, delivered the pricing sheet and recovered when the laptop moved onto mobile data.

For that afternoon in Malta, the best VPN was the one that treated the first working minute as more valuable than the hundredth server.