Ask HN: Can a website kill my internet connection? (WebRTC)

44 points

2 years ago

I have weird behavior when using https://zencastr.com/. The moment I join their videocall-room, my internet becomes super flacky, and drops entirely.

My connection is via WiFi, and the WiFi stays connected and everything, but no connection to neither zencastr.com, fast.com, google.com works.

The tool uses WebRTC for the call, hence I assume it might have something to do with that, but my assumption so far was always that a website I open in my browser does not have any effect to the underlying network stack or so.

When I use a competitor tool, riverside.fm or google meet (both using WebRTC as well) I don't have any of this problems.

My question: Is it possible that a bug in their WebRTC kills my internet? If yes, shouldn't that be prohibited by whatever security mechanism in my browser?

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