COD: Warzone 'WHITELIST FAILURE' error comes to light, potential cause of issue explained

In the last hours, COD: Warzone players have been reporting an annoying issue that does not allow them to enjoy the game.

More specifically, there is a ‘WHITELIST FAILURE’ error message that appears when players try to access a match in COD: Warzone. It seems that many of them were accidentally banned at the server level.

This means that players in certain areas of the world will not be able to access the game. However, this problem will be explained in more detail later in this article.

The ‘WHITELIST FAILURE’ error message has been popping up on the screens of many COD: Warzone players over the past few hours, with no apparent explanation (1, 2, 3, 4).

The pop-up with the error message adds that the player’s Gamertag ‘is not signed in’, and that the player should try to access an ‘approved ATVI network’.

Apparently, after a recent update, COD: Warzone players in some regions are now in a ‘blacklist’. So, they are blocked from accessing the game’s servers.

All players have to be “whitelisted” to be allowed on the servers. So, it seems like some people in certain regions were kicked out with the new update. And there’s features like this for custom tournaments.
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Also, below are more details about the ‘whitelist’:

There are two whitelists in the game: one that prevents known non-cheaters on it from being shadowbanned after being reported. This is what people like HusKerrs are on because they get reported 500 times a day. The other is a list of people that get sent to specific servers/lobbies. They use that for development, testing and sometimes for custom tournaments like in the WSOW.

The error most likely pertains to the latter list.
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At the moment, there is no official statement from Raven Software on this issue. But, in the meantime, there is a workaround that reportedly helps resolve the issue.

Basically, the workaround is to restart the game until the ‘WHITELIST FAILURE’ error message stops appearing. So, it’s a ‘brute force’ method.

Looked online, and it seems like you just need to restart your game a bunch of times until it eventually lets you on. Here’s a quote: “If you’re wondering how to fix the whitelist failure Warzone error, thankfully it’s as easy as restarting your game a couple of times. Essentially, you’ll need to keep restarting your game until the whitelist failure Warzone error has disappeared.”
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For the moment, it only remains is to wait for an official pronouncement on this issue. And, once this happens, we will update this article with the new details.

Finally, you can take a look at the bugs/issues tracker dedicated to the COD saga.

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