Common reasons a tunnel drops
You close the laptop lid and open it an hour later. You leave the house and your phone jumps from Wi-Fi to LTE. You pick a new server. Each of these breaks the tunnel for a moment.
Some networks interfere with VPN traffic on purpose. Expect this more on airport, hotel and office Wi-Fi than at home.
The difference it makes
With the kill switch off, the system does not wait. Messengers, cloud backups and open tabs keep sending data over the plain connection, using your real IP, and you probably will not notice.
With it on, SoVPN cuts network access as soon as the tunnel is gone. Those requests simply fail. Once the app reconnects, everything goes back through the tunnel.
What you see when it kicks in
Pages stop loading and the app shows a disconnected status. Nothing is broken. The app is trying to reconnect, and you can also switch to another server from the list.
When you tap Disconnect yourself, the block is lifted at once and you are on your normal connection. Only drops you did not ask for keep the device offline.
Turning it on
The kill switch is included from Basic up, at no extra cost. In the desktop apps it is a single toggle.
On Android, also enable the phone's own always-on VPN setting for SoVPN. On a router running a WireGuard config file, the router firmware decides what happens on a drop, so check its settings page.
- Windows, macOS, Linux: Settings > Connection > Kill switch
- Android: turn on Settings > Connection > Kill switch in the app, then in the phone's VPN settings enable Always-on VPN and Block connections without VPN for SoVPN
- iOS: Settings > Connection > Kill switch