GAME/SERVER/STATUS
Valorant error

Valorant VAN 9003

On screen: VAN9003. This build of Vanguard requires secure boot to be enabled in order to play.

Not an outage

People land on this error while searching whether the service is down. It is not. This code cannot be produced by an outage, so no amount of waiting will clear it.

What it actually means

Riot's driver refuses to load because UEFI Secure Boot is disabled. Their own wording: VAN 9003 means Secure Boot is not enabled on your system, which is required by Vanguard.

This is configuration, not a fault, and it can never be caused by a Valorant outage.

How to tell which one you have

Press Win+R, run msinfo32 and read the Secure Boot State line. If it says Off, this is your code and it is entirely local. If it says On and you still get VAN 9003, that is worth a ticket rather than more BIOS changes.

Before you change anything

Before enabling fTPM or Secure Boot on an AMD board, suspend BitLocker or save your recovery key. Changing platform measurements makes a number of machines demand the recovery key on the next boot.

Fixes, in the order worth trying

  1. Check BIOS Mode in msinfo32 before touching anything — If it says Legacy rather than UEFI, do not enable Secure Boot yet. Read the next step first.
  2. If your disk is MBR, convert it to GPT first — Run mbr2gpt from an administrator prompt. Enabling Secure Boot on an MBR disk leaves a machine that will not boot, and this is the step missing from most pages ranking for this error.
  3. Enable Secure Boot in UEFI — Then disable CSM or Legacy mode if your board exposes it separately.
  4. After a BIOS update, restore factory keys — Secure Boot often drops to Setup Mode after a firmware update, which fails the check while appearing enabled.

VAN 9001 is the related code for TPM 2.0 rather than Secure Boot, and needs the same UEFI trip for a different setting.

Operator documentation: support.riotgames.com. Riot maintains two separate registries and it matters here: VAN codes are Vanguard, their anti-cheat, while VAL codes are the game. Their Vanguard index states this split explicitly. VAN 9003 is firmly in the anti-cheat registry.

Common questions

What does Valorant VAN 9003 mean?

Riot's driver refuses to load because UEFI Secure Boot is disabled. Their own wording: VAN 9003 means Secure Boot is not enabled on your system, which is required by Vanguard.

Is Valorant VAN 9003 an outage?

People land on this error while searching whether the service is down. It is not. This code cannot be produced by an outage, so no amount of waiting will clear it.

How do I fix Valorant VAN 9003?

Start with: Check BIOS Mode in msinfo32 before touching anything. If it says Legacy rather than UEFI, do not enable Secure Boot yet. Read the next step first.