CS:GO Users Face VAC Verification Issues After Recent Steam Crash

Aditya Singh Rawat
Published On: 
CS:GO Users Face VAC Verification Issues After Recent Steam Crash

Cover-Credits: 

  • A lot of CS:GO users are currently facing 'VAC Verification Issues'.
  • These issues were noticed after the Steam crash which took place earlier today.
  • Many users are blaming the recent 'Trust Factor' updates as the cause for these issues.

CS:GO in recent times has been criticised by the community members for not having fixed old underlying issues with the game files that led to the resurgence of known exploits, granting users vision through smoke grenades and wallhack capabilities following a few simple steps and without the need of third-party software. Adding to their misery, a large portion of the Counter-Strike user base is now dealing with ‘VAC Verification Issues’ following the massive Steam crash that transpired on 6th August.

CS:GO Players Face VAC Verification Issues

A huge majority of the CS:GO user base is currently facing VAC verification issues and these have apparently started to take place since after the Steam mysteriously went down earlier in the day today.

Many users after launching the game are being met with an error notification reading ‘VAC unable to verify game’ when trying to queue up for matchmaking in CS:GO. The problem is not restricted to a particular game mode and seems to be affecting all of them, rendering the user unable to play matches on official VAC-protected servers.

None of the earlier used methods has proven to be effective against these issues. Users have tried ‘verifying game files’ which is considered to be the first logical step when facing such an issue, while a select few individuals have stated that it worked out for them it is not the proper solution to this problem. 

CS:GO Users Face VAC Verification Issues After Recent Steam Crash

Some other things that users have tried to solve the problem are,

  • Clearing their download cache and restarting Steam.
  • Reinstalling both CS:GO and Steam.
  • A few users even reinstalled their operating systems but to no luck.
  • Verifying game file integrity.

Trust Factor Update at Fault?

Many users while discussing the cause of these issues are connecting it with the recent Trusted Launch’ update. The argument by the user states that since the update dropped it has been quite tough to log into Counter-Strike and play the game properly. 

CS:GO Users Face VAC Verification Issues After Recent Steam Crash

The feature was introduced by Valve to help discern cheaters from among the player base by evaluating a user’s ‘Trust Factor’ but this also led to many third-party softwares like OBS, ShadowPlay, and many others being blocked in the process. Since then Valve has been making adjustments but it has only received criticism from the community member.

At the time of writing this article no official statement has been made by Valve or CS:GO developers on the situation. It is now close to twelve hours since the problem was first noticed and the issues have still not been resolved till now.

One plausible temporary solution was provided by u/MotoNomadic which seems to have worked for a few users. According to him, the user should go to ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\bin' and locate a file called ‘SteamService.exe’, this file should then be copied and pasted to ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\commonfiles\steam’ replacing the existing file.

Users can try their luck with the above-mentioned solution that has worked for some players until Valve officially resolves the issue.


author profile picture
Aditya is the in-house CS:GO writer at AFK Gaming. While his understanding of the esports space is not restricted by geographical borders, his current focus lies in the Asian region. Understands and follows almost all major esport titles.