The issue stems from the fact that as of January 28, Gears of War's digital certificate is expired. Those who attempt to play the game after that time will be prompted with the aforementioned error message, and a number of forum posters claimed that they were exited out of the game when the clock flipped over to a new day.

The good news is that Epic Games is aware of the problem and is currently working with Microsoft on a fix. "We have been notified of the issue and are working with Microsoft to get it resolved," an Epic Games community manager said in a post on the company's forums. "This was a surprise to us too. We aren't casting blame or chewing anyone out. We're trying to figure out how and why it happened so we can get it fixed."

While Epic is working on a more permanent solution, resourceful forum posters quickly arrived at an easy fix to the problem. The certificate apparently checks itself against an individual user's internal system clock. By simply setting the clock to a time before the expiration date, that is, before January 29, the game will reportedly function as intended