Ever since the pandemic, a ton of us are  spending long chunks of our day on Zoom.

Or Google Meet, or Teams, or – Skype?? Every time I have to say “oh  sorry, I think your mic cut out there”, I feel a little bit of my soul escape from my belly button.

Though as annoying as it is, video calls do keep me from having to  wear pants and commute to the office, and it doesn’t really affect  my work all that much. So for me it’s a worthwhile trade. I’m not alone in that. 70% of people  say that glitches in Zoom calls don’t affect how they view the  person they’re interacting with.

Except it turns out, that’s not actually true. A 2025 study suggests that these  seemingly insignificant blips can have life-altering impacts. [intro music] Glitches are whenever there’s a temporary  disruption in the audio or video of a video call. This could be because your internet can’t meet the high demands  required for video streaming.

Or because your computer is spending too much of its memory running other programs. Or because of outdated software. Or, sometimes, because of  platform issues and outages.

Whatever the reason, the result is your video and audio de-syncing,  freezing, dropped frames or phrases, or even straight-up crashing. It always manages to freeze and crash on the most unflattering  face you’ve ever made, too. One small survey found that  folks experience glitches in about 30-50% of their video calls.

Since they’re so frequent and  typically out of our control, it’s no wonder we feel like we  don’t hold it against anyone. Just breathe in, breathe out,  and let those glitches go. But as with so many things in psychology, how we feel and how we behave  don’t necessarily align.

In 2025, researchers in the US published a study that looked at the effects of video call glitches on our perception of conversation partners. Basically, in various situations, do we judge people differently  when glitches occur? So, for example, when participants  watched an online webinar by a health coach talking about  the benefits of using sunscreen, they understood the point the coach was making, regardless of glitches.

But they trusted the speaker  less if the video froze. And when the glitches happened, 16% fewer participants indicated that they would be interested in  meeting the health coach in person and working with them one-on-one. That’s super important to consider when we’re living in the era of telehealth.

There were similar results for other domains with equally serious implications for our lives. One experiment showed that in  the context of a job interview, glitches could lower interest in hiring or supporting that candidate by over  half a point on a seven point scale. That’s an 8% drop, nearly a whole letter grade!

So if your call glitches during the interview, that can affect the likelihood you get hired. Of course, this was all measured  during controlled experiments, and the researchers wanted to know if we actually see it play out in real life. So they looked at four months of court transcripts from virtual parole hearings in Kentucky.

That was 472 hearings. They scoured the transcripts for  indications that the video had glitched. Phrases like “we lost you for a  minute” or “I think you glitched”.

Around 33% of calls had these glitches, which is about the same amount  that people had self-reported in that first survey we mentioned! Anyway, they found that 60% of people were granted parole if their  video hearing was smooth, whereas only 48% were granted  parole if there had been a glitch. That’s twelve points less  likely to be granted parole, just because your internet was bad.

The researchers tested whether this result  might be due to glitches making it harder to understand what your communication  partner is talking about, or because disruptions are frustrating, or even because people blame the  person experiencing the glitch. But none of that seemed to entirely  account for what’s going on. Before we tell you what they think is going  on with glitches, we’ve gotta run a quick ad.

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Instead of glitches merely being frustrating, the research team suggests that  glitches are just downright uncanny. Freezes and stuttering  movements and delayed speech don’t occur in real life conversation. So they make something seem just a little bit off and leave us feeling unsettled  and kind of creeped out.

Essentially, glitches break the illusion that  we’re having a real, personal interaction. That isn’t great for how much we  trust our communication partner, or even for how much we just like them. This effect panned out in  the research team’s study, with people reporting a  greater sense of uncanniness when there are glitches in a conversation.

Study participants found certain  glitches more uncanny than others. “Sustained freezes” and “video  distortions” like pixelation were ranked as least disturbing. Whereas echo, “fleeting freezes”, and “sustained video loss” were  given the highest uncanniness scores. The more uncanny the glitch, the more it hurt the glitchy job candidate.

But remember earlier that I  said 70% of people reported that glitches don’t impact how they  view the person they’re talking with. That might be because they know glitches  shouldn’t impact their judgments, so they responded to the survey in a way  that makes them look, or feel, better. But it’s also possible that  this is all subconscious, and we don’t even realize that  glitches are affecting us.

So what’s a virtual girl to do? The researchers tested some potential solutions, though the results weren’t super encouraging. Warning people in advance  that glitches might occur didn’t make much of a difference at all.

Acknowledging a glitch after it happened, saying something like “sorry for the  glitch” or “I think I glitched there”, actually made things worse. One avenue that did show promise  is making a joke about the glitch, which the researchers think  offsets the uncanniness factor by explicitly reminding your conversation  partner that the glitch is harmless. It’s worth continuing to study  how to lessen this effect, and also to keep it in mind as policies,  technology, and video chat scenarios evolve.

For example, some states have permanently moved parole hearings to virtual courtrooms because  it’s cheaper and more secure than transporting incarcerated  people to a physical courtroom. Those are real advantages, but it also means that people in jails and  prisons with poorer internet connections and fewer resources are less likely to get parole than people in facilities with good wifi. And telehealth has been touted as a solution  for people in low-income and rural areas who may be far from doctors’ offices or not  able to get away from work to make the trip.

But the people who turn to telehealth because  they can’t easily access doctors’ offices are the same people who have less  reliable internet connections. Telehealth may improve access to treatment, but it might also cause folks  to trust their providers less. Or their providers might perceive  them as less reliable patients.

As with basically every technology ever, video conferencing has been  great for expanding access to previously inaccessible resources, and for making many people’s lives easier. But it has also potentially widened gaps  in our society that already existed. Moving forward, we need to  ensure our technology glitches aren’t leaving anyone lagging behind. [ OUTRO ]