How to fix CSGO’s “VAC unable to verify”

Valve’s competitive shooter CSGO has encountered a lot of bugs over the years, but not one of them has come even remotely close to annoying the players as much as this error did. Yes, I’m talking about the infamous which has been haunting players for a very long time.

The ‘VAC was unable to verify your game session‘ error is perhaps the most annoying error in CSGO which prevents the player from joining any matches, be it casual, competitive, or even community servers. Restarting your game rarely fixes the VAC issue, and you’re left wondering what you can do to get rid of this monster.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve probably already tried everything in your mind and the nasty bug still won’t succumb to your valiant efforts. Don’t worry, we have you covered. Here are some tips which you can use right now to make the bug disappear and rank up in peace.

• Restart Steam Client: You may have already restarted your CSGO, but this error won’t leave you that easily. To fix it, you need to restart your entire Steam client. To do so, first, exit CSGO. Click on steam, then on the top left go to Steam, and exit (or log out). Relaunch the Steam client, then launch CSGO. Your problem is magically fixed. But on the off chance, it isn’t, read on.
• Restart Your PC: If restarting Steam didn’t fix the issue, restarting your PC might. You probably know how to do that, so let’s not waste time by stating here.
• Verify Game Files: There’s a chance that something might be corrupted in your game files. To find the problem, go to your steam library, right-click on CSGO, then go to verify local files. Once done verifying, your game will automatically re-download corrupted files and restore the game to its original state.
• Reinstall CSGO: Your absolute last resort. Reinstalling the game is almost certain to fix your problem. First, uninstall the game from the control panel or from Steam. Then go to the Steam store and download your fresh copy of CSGO.

Once fixed, you’ll be able to run CSGO smoothly like before and join servers at will. However, it’s not rare for this bug to return in the future. In case that happens, you can just try these steps once again and it’ll be fixed in no time.