League of Legends was completely down yesterday unless you reset your system clock, because Riot forgot to update a security certificate

Many League of Legends players around the world found themselves unshackled from Riot's hit MOBA recently when it became apparent they couldn't log in. Alas, the reprieve was temporary, and it turns out the reason for the outage stemmed from a classic accounting issue.

On Sunday, January 4, fans of the longstanding multiplayer game were left without access for a period of time. Servers around the world appeared to be down, prompting all sorts of speculation about what could be going on at Riot Games for something as big as League of Legends to suddenly go out like this.

Was it a holiday blunder? Sudden server demand? A DDOS attack? None of the above, it seems. The issue appears to have been caused by an overdue renewal, according to information uncovered through access to League's client information.

Riot Games let the SSL certificate lapse. SSL stands for 'Secure Sockets Layer' and the certificate essentially makes sure everything is appropriately protected in whatever you're accessing. If a site or game or anything else doesn't have this, it becomes functionally inaccessible as a way of protecting users.

Players used a roundabout method of getting into the game by resetting their clock, but that was just a temporary fix. You can find basic information on these certs relatively easily, just like people have done for League, uncovering that on January 7, 2016, Riot updated the SSL certificate through to January 4, 2026. Oh, how far away that must've seemed, and yet it arrived awfully quick.

I like to imagine there was an internal task and Google Calendar event set up to remind someone of this, but either they don't work there any more or the people who were pinged were on vacation. Either way, nothing happened until it was slightly too late. Now it's been renewed for 100 years.

Riot Games has yet to comment beyond a tweet from the League of Legends account confirming the outage. I'll see you back here in 2125 to check if Riot manages to remember to update the paperwork again. I bet the reminder is company-wide this time, too.

League of Legends is getting a new client, "entirely new visuals," and "a bit of new gameplay" in a massive 2027 update reportedly codenamed League Next.