I've used opewrt for about 2 weeks now, and today after a power cutoff, the router shows a constant yellow led for the power, while the network led is blinking blue and fine.
Could running vpn on the router at all times affected the router and died after the power cutoff?
I've tried to debrick with tinypxe but the orange light doesn't blink at all when pressing reset and plugging the cable, does that mean the router is fried and should just buy a new one or another brand for installing openwrt?
You are a bit light on details (there are many VPN implementations), but in general 'no'. None of the common VPN implementations (nor anything else) on OpenWrt write to flash while operating normally, the only time flash is written to, is while doing configuration changes (so you know when). Now, two things to consider, NAND (not applicable to your device) also have wear while reading (but even then, during normal operations everything is loaded into RAM anyways, so there will be very few reads hitting the flash anyways) and flash generally doesn't like voltage fluctuations (and powerlosses are rarely 'neat', they typically come with brown-outs, frequency fluctuations, over-voltage, etc.), board designs typically cover this with appropriately sized capacitors.
Apart from the flash chip itself, a messy powerloss event can also cause non-flash damage. It's impossible to tell from a distance, without hands-on debugging.
Thank you for your response, do you recommend I buy the same model or a different brand? I'm afraid of this happening again since power cutoffs happen frequently in my area, this one was fine as an access point for all my needs, so I don't want to spend too much on a router.
I would opt for a different device, not so much out of fear of this happening again (although, why risk it, again), but because this particular one is hard to flash/ recover and relatively low-end. You'll probably find something with better specs in a similar (albeit slightly higher) price range.
Would tp-link archer c50 be a better option or I should go for a better one? sorry for bothering you.
That would not be my first choice, all five (rather different, mt7620a, mt7628, QCA9557) hardware revisions are 'worse' than what you had so far (mt7621a-mt7603en+mt7612en).
What brand and model do you recommend I should buy?
That depends on what you're looking for.
wsm20, covr-x1860 would be the cheapest options, similar to what you had so far (but with wifi6 instead), but there are many other options.
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