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Can't Start a Simulation? Your Organization's Firewall May Be Blocking Our Voice Provider

How to resolve simulation startup failures caused by network or firewall restrictions blocking Practivated's voice technology provider.

Written by John-Karlo Torres

Why This Happens

Practivated's simulations use real-time voice technology powered by our voice partners, including ElevenLabs and VAPI. When your simulation fails to start — often showing a loading screen that never completes, an error message, or silence on the call — your organization's network firewall may be blocking outbound connections to one of these services.

This is most common in:

  • Corporate or nonprofit office networks

  • University or institutional networks

  • VPN environments with strict outbound filtering

  • Any network where IT enforces an allowlist of approved domains


How to Fix It

You'll need to contact your IT or network security team and ask them to whitelist (allow outbound traffic to) the following domains. We recommend whitelisting both providers below, since which one is used can vary by session:

ElevenLabs — AI Voice Generation

api.elevenlabs.io *.elevenlabs.io

Documentation & status: https://elevenlabs.io

VAPI — Real-Time Voice Sessions

api.vapi.ai *.daily.co

These connections use HTTPS (port 443) and secure WebSockets (wss://), which are required for real-time voice communication.


What to Tell Your IT Team

You can forward them this message:

"Our team uses Practivated, a voice simulation training platform. To run simulations, the platform requires outbound access to the following domains over HTTPS and secure WebSockets:

  • *.elevenlabs.io

  • api.vapi.ai

  • *.daily.co

Please whitelist these domains so our team can access the platform's core features."


Still Having Trouble?

If whitelisting these domains doesn't resolve the issue, or if your IT team needs more technical details (IP ranges, specific ports, or SSL certificate info), reach out to us through the chat below and we'll connect you with the right resources.

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