Most camera and mic problems come down to the same handful of causes — a denied permission, the wrong device selected, or another app holding onto the hardware. This page covers those specifically. For network or connection-related causes, our connection errors guide covers that ground instead.
If you clicked "Block" by mistake the first time you visited, or denied access without meaning to, the fix is usually quick:
It's in your browser's address bar, just to the left of chatzyo.in.
Reset both, or set them to "Ask" instead of "Block."
You should be prompted again, and can allow access this time.
Our fuller walkthrough, including Firefox and Safari specifically, is in clearing camera, mic, and cookie permissions.
This message usually means the browser can't reach your camera or microphone — not that the hardware itself is broken. The most common cause is having more than one camera or microphone available (say, a laptop's built-in camera plus a USB webcam) and the wrong one being selected. Go to your browser's Site Settings for chatzyo.in, find Camera (and separately, Microphone), and make sure the device you actually intend to use is the one selected, not just whichever one happened to be chosen by default.
Mobile operating systems add their own permission layer on top of the browser's, so there are two places this can go wrong rather than one:
Settings → Safari → scroll to Camera (and separately Microphone) → make sure chatzyo.in, or Safari generally, is set to "Allow."
Settings → Apps → Chrome → Permissions → make sure Camera and Microphone are both enabled for the app.
Most operating systems only let one application access a camera at a time. If Zoom, Skype, Teams, or another video app is open in the background — even just minimized, not actively in a call — it can hold onto the camera and prevent your browser from accessing it. Closing those apps fully, not just minimizing them, usually resolves this. If you've recently plugged in or unplugged an external webcam, reconnecting it and refreshing the page is also worth trying.
Before digging deeper, it's worth confirming the camera and microphone actually work at all, outside of Chatzyo. Most operating systems have a basic built-in camera app (like the Camera app on Windows or macOS) — opening that and checking whether the feed shows up there too is a fast way to tell whether the problem is specific to the browser or something more fundamental, like a loose cable on an external webcam or a disabled device in your system settings. If it doesn't work in the system camera app either, the issue is on the hardware or OS side, not anything specific to Chatzyo or even to browsers generally.
Camera and mic access can also fail because of network-level restrictions rather than anything about the hardware itself — a strict firewall, a VPN configuration that interferes with WebRTC, or an unstable connection. That side of things is covered in more depth in our connection errors guide and our browser settings guide, since the troubleshooting steps overlap significantly with general connection issues rather than being specific to camera and mic.
Usually a blocked browser permission, the wrong camera selected when you have more than one, or another app already using it.
Reset the camera permission from your browser's address bar settings, then reload the page.
It usually means the browser can't reach your camera or mic — often because another device is selected by mistake, or another app already has it open.