NetNut went offline on 2 July 2026. Here is where to go.
Google, the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation disrupted the network NetNut resold. If your scrapers started failing without warning, that is why. Proxy Rotator is a working rotating plan you can be running on in minutes, from $24.95/mo.
No minimums No sales call Standard HTTPS and SOCKS5, so your code does not change
What actually happened
On 2 July 2026, Google, the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation moved against the residential proxy network sold commercially as NetNut. Google disabled the command and control accounts the operation depended on, and the FBI seized hundreds of associated domains.
The network ran on more than two million compromised consumer devices: smart TVs, streaming boxes and Android phones whose owners had no idea their connections were being resold. Security researchers had been tracking the underlying botnet as Popa. In a single week of June 2026, Google's Threat Intelligence Group observed 316 distinct threat clusters routing through those exit nodes.
Alarum, NetNut's parent, saw its shares fall roughly 67% to about $2.62 in the week after the seizure was announced. NetNut had been widely resold, and had absorbed much of the demand displaced by the earlier IPIDEA takedown, so the disruption reached a lot of businesses that had never dealt with NetNut directly.
What it means if you were using them
The practical effect is that exit nodes stopped answering. Jobs that ran fine in June began timing out or returning connection errors with no change on your side. If you bought through a reseller rather than NetNut directly, your provider may not have told you where the IPs were coming from.
It is worth checking whether any credentials or endpoints you were given are still in code you are running, and rotating anything that was shared with a reseller you can no longer reach.
Moving to Proxy Rotator
Migration is a configuration change, not a rewrite. We speak standard HTTPS and SOCKS5 on a single gateway host, so in most tools you replace the host, port and credentials and your existing code keeps working. There is no minimum spend, no procurement process and no sales call, which matters when you are trying to get production running again the same day.
You can authenticate by whitelisting your server IP or with user and password, whichever your tooling expects. See the setup guide for the exact steps, or the rotating proxy API if you drive it programmatically.
What 750GB of residential bandwidth costs
Same workload, one month, at each provider's advertised rate.
| Provider | Advertised rate | Cost of 750GB | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proxy Rotator | $0.133/GB | $99.95 | 25 thread plan, bandwidth included |
| IPRoyal | $1.75/GB | $1,312.50 | Residential, advertised "from" |
| Decodo | $2.20/GB | $1,650.00 | Residential. Was Smartproxy until April 2025 |
| Oxylabs | $8.00/GB | $6,000.00 | Residential, 10GB entry tier at $80 |
| Bright Data | $10.50/GB | $7,875.00 | Residential, list rate |
Competitor rates verified 2 August 2026 from their public pricing pages. Our figure is generated from the live plan table, so it always matches what you are actually charged.
Where to go next
If you are still comparing, these cover the same decision from other directions.
- All provider alternatives, the rest of the field, each with the same price maths
- IPIDEA alternative, another provider people move from, for a different reason
- Pricing and plans, the per gigabyte figure for every tier
NetNut shutdown and alternatives FAQ
Is NetNut shut down?
Why did my scrapers stop working without any change on my side?
What was the Popa botnet?
I bought NetNut through a reseller. Am I affected?
How do I migrate from NetNut to Proxy Rotator?
How much does Proxy Rotator cost compared with what I was paying?
How quickly can I be running again?
Get your jobs running again
A working rotating plan with residential, datacenter, mobile and IPv6 in one subscription, from $24.95/mo. Standard HTTPS and SOCKS5, so migration is a config change.