I made a quick decision to subscribe to expressvpn before returning to China, and have been extremely happy with the results. That is, until today! Not only has it been able to access previously forbidden sites, but whenever I think my internet access is slow, I check and find the vpn has lost its connection. Restoring it, speeds up everything.

But now it keeps giving me error messages that "other VPN applications" are running in the background. Rebooting doesn't help, and everything is slow. Attempting to login to expressvpn.com gets me the usual "...can't connect to the server…" message.

Have the authorities suddenly discovered this service and blocked it?

UPDATE:
It's back after another reboot and change of connection location!