Valorant 'unable to start correctly,' throwing timeout or critical error? Game not booting is a known issue & your antivirus is to blame

Valorant, one of the most popular free-to-play FPS games, has seen a lot of growth in its player base since its official launch last year.

Riot Games sends out new updates and patches for the game regularly to keep it running smoothly and players glued to their screens.

Of course, every now and then bugs and issues do pop up. Some of these bugs are minor and don’t directly affect gameplay while others can completely ruin the gameplay experience such as the XP and rewards issue.

Now it appears that many Valorant players are facing a bunch of issues including the ‘unable to start correctly’ error, ‘timeout’ or ‘critical error,’ when booting the game.

Reports of these issues have begun flooding Twitter and Reddit. We’ve shared some images of these issues from affected users below for reference:

According to user reports, these are the exact errors that pop up when trying to start or boot up Valorant on their PCs:

– We couldn’t install a required dependency. Please try again, restart your computer or reach out to our player support team.
– The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000005).
– Timeout something unusual has happened.

Fortunately, Riot Games or Valorant has acknowledged the issue officially by posting a tweet claiming that they are aware of the problem and it’s being caused by antivirus software.

So the temporary solution to the unable to start correctly, timeout, or critical error issues on Valorant is to disable the antivirus software on your computer before launching the game.

Someone has also shared a video guide on YouTube that lets users fix the timeout error. You can watch it here.

It’s also worth pointing out that the error code 0xc0000005 usually pops up when there is an issue loading a client and is fairly common on Windows.

Unfortunately, Valorant or Riot Games have yet shared a timeframe regarding the release of a fix for the unable to start correctly, timeout, and couldn’t install required dependency issues.

So we will keep track of the situation and will post an update once new details are available or when the fix for the aforementioned issues goes live.

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