“Your connection could not be verified so your session has been terminated.”

A kick that says your earnings were kept

The message has two sentences, and players usually quote only the first. The one full quotation located, posted on Steam on 1 October 2026, reads: “Your connection could not be verified so your session has been terminated. All cash/XP earned this session has been saved.” That player saw it prefixed “KICKED Caution”, on their third match in a row. The second sentence is a claim about what you earned during the session. It says nothing about what you spent, and the players reporting losses describe purchases: one had spent 30k on a purchase, was kicked about ten minutes later, and calls it “a loss of 30k”. No official text describes a refund for a kick of any kind.

1 October: two threads titled with it inside an hour

The earliest public reports located are both from 1 October 2026. A thread titled “CONNECTION VERIFY FAILED KICKED” opened at 12:59 UTC and reached 71 posts. Six minutes later a second thread, titled with the message itself, opened with “After 3–5 minutes on the server, I get kicked”. The replies describe the kick repeating: three matches in a row, again on rejoining, unchanged after swapping servers, on OCE servers. One player notes servers sitting at 40/100 or 60/100 as “massive amounts of people” were booted. A reply on the Update 0.1.2 announcement thread blames that update, which had gone live the previous morning. Nobody from BULKHEAD or Team17 replied on any of the thread's five pages, read on 10 October.

The next day's hotfix notice: timeline, not cause

At 00:13 UTC on 2 October, roughly eleven hours after the first reports, BULKHEAD published a Security & Stability Hotfix notice. It scheduled maintenance for 08:00 UTC that day, with about an hour of downtime, “to address minor security and stability issues affecting some players”. The notice names no symptom and no message. Nothing published connects it to this kick, so this page records it as the nearest official event in time and nothing more.

The 2 October hotfix notice in full →

Not the heartbeat kick, and not a ban

Two neighbouring messages are easy to confuse with this one, and each has its own page. All three end your session, but they appear at different moments and were first reported on different days. The players in the 1 October threads joined new servers and were kicked again. That is how a kick behaves, not a ban, though nothing official says either way.

“KICKED: no valid heartbeat within window” →

What is not established

BULKHEAD and Team17 have not said what is being verified, whether the check belongs to the anti-cheat, the servers or the account service, or why it failed for so many players at once on 1 October. Nothing says whether the 2 October hotfix changed it. There is no published rule for refunding a loadout lost to any kick, so the message's promise covers earnings only. How often it happens since 1 October is not published either. If you see it, note the time in UTC and the server region. That is what would let a later report be matched to an official one.

Common questions