Season 1 went live on November 6, and within hours the official Call of Duty live updates account flagged a problem on PC. The post says the team is investigating reports that players on Steam encounter a crash at launch after taking the Season 1 update. It names no cause, no scale, and no patch date, and it links a live issues card for tracking.
Confirmed. This comes straight from the official Call of Duty live updates account, which states it is investigating and spells out the workaround itself. What is confirmed is the investigation and the steps, not a root cause, a scale, or a fix date. None of those have been published.
Why hardcore SnD cares
Search is the mode where a missing body hurts most. You cannot rotate a man down, you cannot trade for him, and you cannot respawn him at the top of the round. A crash that happens at launch, before anyone loads a lobby, takes the player off the board for the whole night rather than for one round.
- A scrim needs five. If one player cannot boot, the practice block is a four stack running a drill it will never run in a real match. That is worse than canceling.
- The workaround is not fast. Verifying files is minutes. The fallback is a full uninstall, a manual folder delete, and a re-download of a very large install. Nobody is doing that between maps.
- PC is the proving lane. Mouse and keyboard players and anyone chasing a ranked or league result on PC are the ones blocked here. Console lobbies are untouched by this specific report.
What the official post actually says
The order of operations is the useful part. First, verify the integrity of your game files through the Steam interface. If that does not clear it, the post describes a final workaround: uninstall Modern Warfare 4 and Warzone on Steam, then also delete the Call of Duty folder inside the steamapps common directory where the game was originally installed, and reinstall. That manual folder delete is the step people skip, and it is the reason a plain reinstall sometimes changes nothing.
A crash at launch is not a skill issue. Check your files before you question your aim.
What it changes tonight
Treat this as a pre-session checklist item, not an emergency. Have your PC players verify files before the block starts rather than at scrim time, and if someone needs the reinstall path, start the download early and plan to run a man down or sub for the first hour. There is no fix date, so build the night around the possibility that it is still broken.