Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

The whole point of me getting a VPN was to bypass the blocking of torrent sites.

I'm currently using PIA and am usually connected to the internet via their local servers ( either in Australia or New Zealand).

I'm suddenly having difficulty connecting to some of the more prominent torrent sites/hosts.

Although I manage to perform the security verification on (say) ext.to I'll encounter a 'Web server is returning an unknown host error' message.

Error code 520

If I connect to a Hong Kong server, though, I don't encounter this error and manage to get through. I initially thought both sites were down but it is as if some local VPN blocking might be now going on.

Is that likely or possible?