On screen: The Rockstar Games Services are unavailable and offline play could not be verified (code 133).
This one genuinely goes both ways, so the first job is telling which you are looking at.
This is Rockstar's entitlement check. The game asked their service to confirm you are allowed to play offline, and the service did not answer in a way it could use.
Two very different situations produce it. Their authentication service being overloaded or down, which you cannot fix. Or your own copy being in a state the check rejects — launched without a connection, or on an account that has been offline a long time.
If you are reading this on a launch day, this is the code to know. Verification is exactly what strains when millions of people start a new game within the same hour.
Check Rockstar's authentication service, which the status block above covers. If it is degraded, this is theirs and waiting is correct. If it reads healthy and you have a working connection, the problem is on your side and the steps below apply.
Code 134 shows an almost identical message with a different number and a completely different cause.
Operator documentation: support.rockstargames.com. Worth knowing about this source. Rockstar publishes no index of error codes at all — we checked their support home, their search, which returns a 404, and their own Error Code category filter, which returns nine articles of which one is actually about an error code. Their pages exist but are findable only through outside search. They are the third major operator we have found doing this, after Sony and Twitch.
This is Rockstar's entitlement check. The game asked their service to confirm you are allowed to play offline, and the service did not answer in a way it could use.
This one genuinely goes both ways, so the first job is telling which you are looking at.
Start with: Launch the game while online. The check needs a connection. Starting offline is the single most common cause of this code outside an incident.