ARC Raiders ART00004 Error: What It Means & How to Fix

The ART00004 error shows up right as you're about to drop into a raid, which is the game's way of reminding you that dying to a server is somehow worse than dying to an ARC. Translated from corporate into English, it means "retrieving data from backend services timed out." Your client pinged Embark's servers, the servers didn't answer fast enough, and the whole login attempt collapsed. Nothing about your loadout, your stash, or your dignity is at fault here. It's a backend problem dressed up as your problem.

What ART00004 Actually Is

This is an ARC Raiders network timeout, not a corrupted save or a hardware failure. The client is functioning fine; it's the handshake with the backend that never completes. Because ARC Raiders leans on persistent world states, live matchmaking, and real-time inventory syncing, any hiccup in that chain throws the same error regardless of what platform you're on.

Check This Before Touching a Single Setting

Before diagnosing an ARC Raiders connection error on your end, confirm it isn't happening on Embark's end first. Check ARC Raiders server status through the official Discord, the game's X account, or Downdetector. One past outage on December 25, 2025 reportedly hit around 25,000 US players simultaneously, and no amount of router-cycling fixes a problem that lives entirely on someone else's infrastructure.

If thousands of people across different ISPs and platforms get the same error at the same time, that's not your Wi-Fi. That's Embark having a bad day.

Fixes Worth Trying, In Order

If servers are confirmed live and you're still staring at the error, work through this list before concluding the universe hates you specifically.

1. Fully close ARC Raiders — exit completely, don't just back out to the title screen — and relaunch.
2. Restart your router: power off for 30–60 seconds, then back on.
3. Check for a pending game update. Consoles especially will silently sit on an old version and get rejected by the backend.
4. Sync your system clock. The backend uses time-stamped security handshakes, and a drifted clock reads as a security risk, not a typo.
5. Switch to a wired connection. Wi-Fi jitter is a disproportionate cause of ARC Raiders login error reports.
6. Verify game files through Steam (right-click → Properties → Installed Files → Verify Integrity).
7. Change your DNS to Google (8.8.8.8) or Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) if ISP routing looks like the culprit.
8. Temporarily disable firewall/antivirus interference with Easy Anti-Cheat, then re-enable it after testing.

When It's Genuinely Not Your Fault

Sometimes this is a straightforward ARC Raiders backend error and there's nothing to troubleshoot. Major content drops flood login servers, queues form, and some of those queued connections simply time out before they clear. If your clock is right, your files are verified, your connection is wired, and you're still locked out, you're waiting on Embark, not on yourself. Following official channels for outage confirmation saves you from repeating fixes that were never going to work.

Related Headaches

An ARC Raiders disconnect issue mid-raid is a separate flavor of pain from ART00004 at login, but the causes overlap heavily: unstable routing, server load, and the same backend dependency. If you're getting kicked out during a run rather than blocked at the door, the fixes above still apply, they just won't feel as satisfying since you already lost the loadout.