Following the release of a new update for Call of Duty: Warzone and the recently released Black Ops 6 this morning, players in both games have reported experiencing a "Connecting" issue while matchmaking. The bug seems to lock players in an infinite loop of waiting for the matchmaker to find them a match, stopping them from playing the game.
Sadly, there's no workaround for this at the moment, though Activision has acknowledged the problem on social media: "As we roll out the current update, players may temporarily notice longer than usual matchmaking times," reads a post on the publisher's official Call of Duty Updates X (Twitter) account. This makes it sound like there might be a server-side performance issue rather than some sort of matchmaking bug, though without more information, I can only speculate.
Ultimately, it may be best to avoid trying to play the Warzone battle royale or Black Ops 6 matches for now as Activision works out the kinks in the Call of Duty multiplayer network. Hopefully, though, the developers are able to get everything up and running as soon as possible. If more updates come through official channels, I'll be sure to update this article with the latest information.
The emergence of this issue made me think that the update to Warzone and Black Ops 6 was a major one with lots of changes, adjustments, and improvements, but it's actually quite small compared to the substantial patches that have come in the past. The Warzone patch notes show that there were just some small fixes for miscellaneous bugs like models for item pickups disappearing and missing death icons; the patch notes for the Black Ops 6 update aren't up yet, but the highlight of it according to Activision is that players should no longer be able to encounter disappearing vehicles in multiplayer.
To be clear, it's great to see bugs and glitches like these being addressed, though it does make me wonder why an update this small ended up causing a problem this big. Regardless, with the developers aware of the issue, it'll be resolved soon with any luck.
Call of Duty: Warzone and Black Ops 6 in general are every bit as popular as you'd expect new Call of Duty games and seasonal releases to be, with the series dominating Xbox and PlayStation charts over the holiday break and a new Squid Game event driving plenty of player engagement. Warzone's ranked experience may be terrible, but overall, countless fans are having a blast with the two games.
