Overwatch 2 Winter Wonderland challenges not progressing for many, Blizzard says it's a known issue

Overwatch 2’s 2025 Winter Wonderland event has barely gone live, and its limited-time challenges are already bugged for a lot of players. Blizzard has now added the problem to its official known-issues list, confirming that some Winter Wonderland challenges aren’t tracking progress correctly.​

This year’s Winter Wonderland runs from December 9 to January 7 and introduces a new three-path reward system powered by Winter Cookies you earn from event challenges and other modes. Those cookies feed into reward tracks themed around Jingle Tracer, Krampus Junkrat, and Santa Claus Torbjörn, making challenge progression the main way to chase this year’s marquee festive skins. It’s a more structured twist on past Winter Wonderland events, which traditionally leaned on a rotating Arcade playlist and a pile of seasonal cosmetics.​

A few reports mention that the prop‑hunt style Mischief & Magic mode seems to track normally while other brawl challenges remain frozen, suggesting the bug is tied to specific playlists rather than the entire event tab.

In posts and clips shared around the community, the challenge tiles look normal in the UI, but the “games played” counters simply refuse to move after each match.

Posts on Reddit’s r/Overwatch and r/Overwatch2 are filled with similar stories, with players grinding for an hour or more and getting no visible progress toward the event’s “play three games” and brawl‑specific objectives.

Several users are pointing each other toward Blizzard’s bug‑report forum, where multiple Winter Wonderland topics went up on December 9, including posts explicitly titled “Winter wonderland event challenges not working” and “Winter wonderland challenges are not progressing.”​

In a December 9 update to its Overwatch 2 Known Issues thread, Blizzard says it’s aware that some Winter Wonderland challenges aren’t progressing and frames the post as a targeted snapshot of bugs in the current release. The company doesn’t give a timeline for a fix or say whether missing progress and rewards will be retroactively granted once the issue is resolved.

With the 2025 event pushing players to farm Winter Cookies through challenges to advance those three cosmetic tracks, every broken match now feels like lost currency as well as lost time. That makes each day this bug sticks around a bigger deal than a one‑off UI hiccup.​

If you’re affected, it’s probably worth either sticking to modes that do seem to track or playing casually until Blizzard updates the known‑issues post or patch notes with a confirmed fix. Let’s hope the studio not only patches the bug quickly, but also backfills missing challenge progress or extends the event so early‑bird players aren’t punished for jumping in on day one.