Errors have been plaguing Rockstar Services for years and while the company never fixed them, the community found a few workarounds for both GTAO and RDO.
Rockstar services might become unavailable if the servers are down for some reason but that is easily checked through their service status page. If everything there is green but you are still getting errors when trying to play GTA Online or Red Dead Online, it may be because your IP got randomly blacklisted.
Diagnosing issues preventing you from playing Rockstar's online games
When this happens, you will get one of the following messages when trying to play GTAO:
- Files required to play GTA Online could not be downloaded from the Rockstar Games Service
- The Rockstar Game services are unavailable right now
- Your save data could not be loaded from the Rockstar cloud servers at this time
Additionally, you may notice the following errors with Social Club:
- has logged in Rockstar Social Club (Offline mode)
- Initializing Rockstar Social Club
In RDO, it will simply say you need to go online in Social Club to access the Online component and it will not allow you to attempt to join at all.
How to solve these issues
There are plenty of suggestions on the internet that could potentially fix the aforementioned errors but in our experience, only two of them were not a wild goose chase, with a third one working in the correct scenarios.
The problem here lies with Rockstar blacklisting your IP address for some reason. Therefore, fixing the problem means you have to change your IP. You can do this with the following methods:
- Turn your router off for 10 minutes or longer - literally unplug it from the power source. If you have a dynamic IP, it will change after you power the router back on and your issue should be solved. To check if you IP changed, just google "my IP" and write the numbers down. Following the powering off and on, google the same query again and if the numbers are different, it has changed and you should be good to go. If the IP remains the same, then you likely have a static IP and will require one of the following two solutions
- Call your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and ask them to change your IP. Just like with the first option, you can easily check your IP address on google before and after in order to verify the change
- Use VPN. This solution is faster than calling the ISP but if you can avoid it, I would suggest doing so. There are several reasons I don't like this method but some of them include having lag while playing with a VPN and possibly being against TOS. If you end up having to resort to VPN usage and don't want to pay for it, there are a few free options, such as Proton VPN.
GTA Online by Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive
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Overall having to change the IP should never be a requirement for players in order to be able to play a game and frankly, it's embarrassing at this point that Rockstar didn't solve this issue after all these years of fans reporting the problem. In fact, it only got worse since the Los Santos Tuners update in GTAO.
