I have been having really bad chat issues for about a week. Randomly when I load the game there will be no chat rooms available. It has gotten MUCH worse. If I have the chat window up it repeatedly tried to connect to chat, so much so that the game eventually hangs. Closing chat is a workaround.

Handle: dem0nfr0g1983
platform: Steam

when chat tries to reconnect, one thing that can cause that is your router. If your router has been on for weeks then the DNS table can sometimes get corrupt or forced to need to 're-lease' its connections. So reboot the router.
if that's not it then it is something else at your end, not sure how much help the Developers can be.

and if it's just that chat is not defaulted to opening when you open the game, that is something I have noticed and commented on, but can live with one mouse click.

This issue has nothing to do with a router, that's just crazy.

This is happening to many people including me. Also, if I leave chat open, my game will crash. For me, its been happening all weekend. (Steam user)

I'm sure it's a server thing. They probably couldn't get it fixed yesterday or the day before because of the 24 hour steam but hopefully they are working on it.