VPN tunnels drop. Wi-Fi hiccups, a server is taken out for maintenance, your phone wakes from sleep. The question is what happens in the seconds that follow.
Without a kill switch
Your device does the helpful thing and falls back to the normal connection. Apps keep running, requests keep going out, and your real IP address is attached to every one of them — usually with no visible sign that anything changed.
With a kill switch
Traffic is blocked at the network layer until the tunnel is restored. Pages fail to load for a moment. That failure is the feature: nothing left your device unprotected.
Where it matters most
- Hotel and airport Wi-Fi, which drop constantly.
- Long-running transfers you are not watching.
- Anything where a single unprotected request is one too many.