My VPN settings keep flashing connecting then blank

This behaviour often indicates that your VPN client is having difficulties establishing a secure connection. This typically occurs on networks that are blocking network connections on one more ports to a particular host gateway. Resolution often requires selection of a different VPN protocol and/or VPN Gateway.

It means that the VPN provider and their centralized servers are having great difficulty capturing and scanning at least your network traffic, if not everybody else using those servers for getting their traffic analyzed and metadata recorded. You might try a different entity—various are seemingly affiliated with advertising and data collection entities—as they might be able to better capture and harvest the metadata associated with your network traffic.