How to fix “searching for a match” Modern Warfare error

Hamza Khalid
How to fix the "searching for a match" error

You’ll be eager to join a new game right away when playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but a match error is causing players to keep waiting for longer periods in the lobby. Here’s how you can fix this issue.

Call of Duty players are not strangers errors that ruin their game, like the Bravo 433 Destructive Gator error code, in Black Ops Cold War. Modern Warfare players are still suffering from Error Code 38, as well as another annoying bug.

If you’re looking for a new session, you might find yourself stuck on a screen with the message “searching for a match” being displayed. If you don’t want to keep waiting for long, here are all the solutions you can try in Modern Warfare.

How to fix “searching for a match” error in Modern Warfare

Enable Crossplay

Enabling Crossplay in Modern Warfare

You might find yourself stuck in the searching for a match” screen because there aren’t enough available players for a game on your platform of choice. If you have a Call of Duty account, then you can enable Crossplay.

If your gamertag is linked with your CoD account, then you can get this done the next time you log into Modern Warfare. Here’s what you need to do:

  • Launch Modern Warfare
  • Go to settings
  • Navigate to the Account tab
  • Change Crossplay from “Disabled” to “Enabled”

That’s all you need to do to enable Crossplay in Modern Warfare. This will widen the search on other platforms, which will increase your chances of finding enough players for a single match. Be sure to enable Crossplay Communication from the same tab.

Select ‘QUICK MATCH’ with no filters

Shipment in Modern Warfare

because the game is taking a while to find enough people for match. This could be because of the filters you’ve enabled, along with the chosen game mode.

You can resolve this problem by disabling all of the filters and using the “QUICK MATCH” option. Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Head to the Multiplayer screen
  2. Move down to QUICK PLAY under “Play”
  3. Move to the right of that option, and you’ll see the filters
  4. Select it, and you’ll see all the different filters that enabled by a gold checked circle
  5. Disable as many as you can, and then return to the previous screen to start the match

Restart the game or console

Captain Price in Modern Warfare

This is the most common fix for software and hardware problems on every platform. If the game is still keeping you stuck on that screen, then you should try shutting it off, and then restarting it.

if you’re a console player then the problem could be a missing update that you can’t see, so try restarting your console if the problem persists. This will either fix it, or make the missing update show up.

To hard restart Xbox consoles:

  1. Hold down the power button until the Xbox completely shuts down.
  2. Release the power button.
  3. Disconnect the power cable.
  4. Wait five minutes.
  5. Plug the power cable back in.
  6. Turn your Xbox back on.
Alex in Modern Warfare

Completely restarting the PlayStation is much simpler:

  1. Hold down the power button for 5 seconds until the PlayStation completely shuts down.
  2. Wait a few seconds.
  3. Press and hold the power button until the PlayStation turns back on.

Check if the servers are up

Ghost in Modern Warfare

If these solutions haven’t solved the problem, then the game’s servers might be down for maintenance. You can try checking out the status of the servers on the Activision website while you wait.

Hopefully, the servers will then come back online soon enough, and you won’t have to deal with the “searching for a match” screen when you log back in.

Image credits: Activision

About The Author

Hamza is a Content Creator & Publisher at Charlie INTEL, who graduated from Bahria University with a Bachelors degree in Business Administration. He's spent the past few years covering news and guides for various video games, including Call of Duty and Apex Legends. He loves digital art, movies, and comic books. You can contact Hamza at [email protected].