What do I do when the VPN won't connect?

Three things before you call:

• Confirm your internet works. Open a website. It sounds obvious and it is the answer surprisingly often, particularly on hotel and coffee shop networks where you have not accepted their terms page yet.
• Try a different network. Your phone's hotspot is the fastest test. Many public, hotel, and some home ISP networks block the ports VPNs use. If it connects on the hotspot, the problem is the network you were on, not your laptop or our equipment.
• Restart the machine, properly. Not sleep and wake. VPN clients get into a stuck state that a genuine restart clears, and it takes two minutes.

If it fails on every network, or it fails for everyone at once, that is ours and we want to know immediately.

One thing worth asking anyway: if people are using a VPN mainly to reach files, there may no longer be a reason for it. A lot of businesses still run a VPN out of habit years after everything moved to Microsoft 365. Fewer moving parts is better.