Play Call of Duty: Black Ops 6? Windows 11's latest patch reportedly has a game-breaking bug

Windows 11's most recent (optional) update has been causing serious problems with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, according to some reports - though Microsoft has also fixed a separate issue with this patch.

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Whether it's Black Ops 6 crashes, or installation failures, the optional update for February appears to have caused some grief thus far (Image Credit: Pixabay)

Let's start with that nasty Black Ops 6 bug, with the game seemingly being scuppered by KB5052093, which is the preview update for February 2025 for Windows 11 24H2.

Windows Latest picked up on this and points out that reports of this happening seem to be scattered, with just a reader complaining and a couple of gamers on Reddit.

However, it appears there are a few more posts on Reddit now, featuring quite a number of exasperated PC gamers experiencing Black Ops 6 failing to launch, and the game getting stuck on Battle.net with a blue spinning circle when trying to load.

Apparently, the only solution is to remove KB5052093, and such are the perils of downloading an optional update. Obviously enough, any preview updates are more likely to have bugs than release versions.

We can but hope that Microsoft is looking into the issue with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and the conflict with KB5052093, because this patch becomes the full update for Windows 11 24H2 on March 11, just a week tomorrow.

And at that point, if the bug isn't stamped out, we'd imagine there might be a lot of frustrated Black Ops 6 players around.

A fix for installation woes

As mentioned at the outset, there's some more positive news here, which is that while KB5052093 was failing to install for some Windows 11 24H2 users, Microsoft has now fixed this problem.

Again, as noticed by Windows Latest, there were reports of the optional update failing and producing the usual gibberish error codes (0x800f0983 and 0x800f0993 were the two cited by the tech site). In some cases, the update was only getting partway through and then stalling before producing said error.

Seemingly Microsoft took action to yank the update down, and then did some fixing, before sending it live again over the weekend. (Or at least for a time, Windows Latest said it couldn't grab the update - so the patch seemed to have been pulled temporarily).

Since then, in a post on the Feedback Hub, Microsoft has said that these installation issues with KB5052093 have been fixed, stating: "We've made changes based on this feedback, and they're ready to try on your current build."

As to what the changes were, well, we're not told. Although to be fair, we don't really need to know the ins-and-outs - if it cures the installation process falling over, then that's all that really matters. So, let's hope this fix does indeed work as advertised, and that Microsoft can also address those apparent problems with Black Ops 6.

Read more: Microsoft warns some Windows 11 users they should downgrade to Windows 10 'immediately'