can not connect to Kodi reposository

it seems that if you have a VPN running on a router, you cannot connect to the Kodi addon repository. Turned off the VPN on the router and presto, all is good. Turned on the VPN and back to not working again. What has changed? I noticed that I now get a captcha screen when going to the Kodi download page. I can only sumize that the server does not like my VPN ip. It used to work.