If you are running a webinar attendees can sometimes use the chat to ask a question when you want them to use the Q&A. You might have reminded them but it is easy to do and click on the wrong option. Your attendees might be enjoying the webinar and in their excitement click on chat. To prevent them from doing this you can switch the chat feature off.

It is also possible that you might not want the attendees to interact at all and have both the chat and Q&A off.

Or are you just holding a meeting and don’t want the participants distracted and chatting to each other or even to you.

You can switch it off and it is done on the Zoom website, https://zoom.us. The thing is when you switch it off it is switched off for all your Zoom meetings or webinars until you switch it on again.