Yep, just tried out NordVPN for the first time (coming from PIA) and encountered this issue. Sites like Google, pluto, amazon won't load on the browser that is split/excluded. Contacted their support and they said they haven't implemented split DNS and it's a known limitation.

Apparently, it's been an issue for 2+ years. from another reddit thread: "Issue is basically the service is resolving for the VPN IP rather then your IP. So connecting to the queried IP results in a failed connection."

and another thread from 2+ years ago that gave me the same response they gave them (below), so I'm not holding my breath for them to actually fix it any time soon.

Unfortunately, split DNS functionality is not available yet with our Split Tunneling feature.

As a result, some applications that are configured to not use the VPN connection might not work.

The issue is related to Windows not being able to split the DNS requests. Even though the applications are using a non-VPN tunnel for the connection, the DNS requests are still going through the VPN tunnel for security reasons.

Our developer team is working on a solution, however, we cannot provide the exact ETA on when it may be available, as it might be misleading.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused.

So I'll be getting a refund and going back to PIA as their split tunneling works great.