How to fix Escape from Tarkov freezing issues

If you’ve been unable to finish your recent Escape from Tarkov raids due to annoying freezing issues, you certainly aren’t alone. Luckily, there’s an explanation and a potential fix, too.

Performance hiccups and bugs are common in online games, especially after a new update—and Escape from Tarkov isn’t immune to them. That said, freezing issues that render the game unplayable are never acceptable and warrant the developer’s immediate attention. We understand your frustration, and while the officials strive to fix the trigger, are here to share a couple of workarounds to potentially mitigate it. 

Freezing issues in Escape from Tarkov, explained: How to fix

While you may experience minor performance hiccups in Escape from Tarkov from time to time and can intervene to fix them, severe freezing issues that manifest suddenly and block you from completing matches are usually caused by internal bugs. 

If it’s an internal bug, there isn’t much you can do to fix it, but you can work around the cause to continue playing the game. For example, at the time of writing, there’s an ongoing breakout of freezing issues, first reported after the scheduled server maintenance on Sept. 6 ended. Players have been flooding to community pages hosted on the official website and Reddit, narrating instances of how they’ve been unable to complete raids due to crashes and screen freezes. It took a while for them to realize what the trigger was—the latest Discord update—and they figured out a simple fix:

Exit Discord completely and relaunch Escape from Tarkov.

Battlestate Games has acknowledged the issue and announced that it’s a “Discord problem.” That said, many players haven’t been able to fix the freezing issues by just stopping Discord. If you’re among them, try the following workarounds:

1. Make sure you exit Discord from the system tray.
2. Disable NVIDIA Geforce Experience overlay.
3. Exit all unnecessary background apps like Spotify and more.
4. Make sure your rig’s RAM isn’t acting up. Low RAM availability can cause freezing issues in resource-hungry games like Escape from Tarkov. 
5. Check for pending updates to your system’s drivers and the OS and complete them, if any. 
6. Try disabling the anti-virus tool protecting your PC temporarily and check if the freezing issue persists. 

As of now, Discord hasn’t acknowledged its hand in the ongoing freezing issues in Escape from Tarkov, but considering Battlestate Games’ announcement, it’s likely to roll out an update to fix the bug soon.