How to Fix “exe/bad_challenge” Error in COD MW2

The sky is blue. The grass is green. Roses are red. Violets are totally not blue. Rough launch of a Call of Duty game. Old man yells at cloud. Pretty standard everyday sayings for this day and age. Yet another error has appeared in COD MW2, so we have once again summoned our tech support experts to bring you a fix to this novel “exe/bad_challenge” error. Here’s what you can do.

How to Fix “exe/bad_challenge” Error in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Some errors hit all platforms, and some are PC-exclusive, but this “exe/bad_challenge” one is mostly reported on PlayStation. Activision has not made a statement about this yet, and we hope that this means that a permanent solution is underway. By the time this article was written and published, we did not see any official news on this.

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However, there are some workarounds that you can attempt locally, and they sometimes work, and sometimes, sadly, they do not:

• Check if your game is updated – Version mismatch may be the cause of this, so double-check that.
• Restart the game – The common customer support trope called “have you tried turning it off and on again?” sometimes does the trick.
• Restart your console – Same as above basically.
• Some users have reported that they have managed to bypass this by jumping into their Weapon Loadout / Class menu as soon as it becomes possible after queueing for a game (do not wait in the lobby!).
• Reinstall the game – Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

Related: Uh Oh… New Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Exploit is Giving Players Free Paid Content

If all else fails, you will need to wait for a hotfix. Make sure to check our other COD MW2 articles, guides, and news pieces under the game tag below!