A call that won't connect, or drops partway through, is almost always a network or browser issue rather than anything wrong with Chatzyo specifically. Here's what's actually happening and what genuinely helps.
When a call starts, your browser exchanges "ICE candidates" with the other person's browser — small pieces of information that help the two devices find the most direct path to each other. If a strict firewall or router configuration blocks this exchange, the call can connect briefly and then drop, or fail to connect at all.
One option some networking guides suggest is enabling UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) on your router, which lets applications open the ports they need automatically. It's worth knowing the honest tradeoff here: UPnP can help with exactly this kind of connection issue, but it also lets any application on your network open ports without asking first, which is a real security consideration, not just a technicality. If you do enable it, it's worth turning it back off once you've confirmed it solved the problem, rather than leaving it on indefinitely as a standing setting.
A VPN is a legitimate privacy tool — see our guide on IP visibility if that's why you're using one — so this isn't a blanket recommendation against them. That said, every additional hop your data takes through a VPN server adds some latency, and not all VPN protocols handle real-time video well. If you're having connection trouble and use a VPN, temporarily disabling it is a reasonable way to check whether it's the cause. If it is and you still want to use one, a VPN built on the WireGuard protocol tends to handle real-time traffic like video calls better than older protocols.
Modern browsers, particularly Chrome and Safari, include features that put inactive tabs to sleep to save memory and battery. If you switch to another tab during a call and the browser decides to "hibernate" the Chatzyo tab, the connection can drop without much warning. If this happens repeatedly, check your browser's performance or memory-saver settings and add an exception for the site, or simply avoid switching away from the tab during an active call.
Video calling is upload-heavy — you're sending your own video out continuously, not just receiving. Many home and mobile connections are designed with much faster download speeds than upload speeds, which is fine for browsing or streaming but can be the actual bottleneck for video calls, particularly on mobile data in busy areas. If video quality drops or calls stutter, checking your upload speed specifically (rather than just overall speed) is more useful than it might seem.
Your browser typically uses your graphics hardware to process video efficiently. Occasionally, outdated graphics drivers cause a conflict that crashes the video specifically while audio keeps working. If you notice this pattern, toggling hardware acceleration off in your browser's settings forces video processing onto the CPU instead, which is slower but sometimes more stable on older hardware with outdated drivers.
Usually a firewall or network configuration blocking the connection, a browser putting the tab to sleep in the background, or an unstable internet connection.
Yes. Ad blockers and privacy extensions sometimes restrict WebRTC connection details, which can cause a call to drop. Trying incognito mode is a quick way to check whether an extension is the cause.
If you've tried the above and a call still won't connect reliably, trying a completely different network — mobile data instead of a restrictive office or school Wi-Fi, for instance — is a useful way to narrow down whether the problem is specific to that one network's configuration rather than your device or browser. Networks with heavy firewall rules, common on corporate or institutional Wi-Fi, are a frequent cause of connections that work fine elsewhere but fail consistently in one specific location.