League of Legends servers down for 12-hour maintenance

League of Legends servers are down for maintenance for a full 12 hours across North America.

In a tweet late last night, developer Riot Games announced via its official support account that "we will be performing extended maintenance impacting players in the NA region." Both League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics will be entirely unavailable today from 01:00 PT/ 04:00 ET until 13:00 PT/16:00 ET.

Riot hasn't directly explained why it's undertaking such a lengthy period of maintenance, saying that the aim is simply to "improve the experience." Over on Reddit, however, players have been suggesting that they've been facing significant lag spikes over the last week or so. Others have pointed out that the game's Application-Programming Interface (API), which tracks player statistics and details about recent games, has been turning up inaccurate information in recent days.

Despite those issues and the potential fix, however, some players aren't impressed with the amount of downtime they're facing. While Riot has clearly attempted to limit disruption with the late night/early morning maintenance, those trying to login on the east coast are likely to have to go a little longer without playing. Others are hoping that other issues, such as long-term champion bugs or issues around bots, will also be tackled over the next few hours, but that seems less likely.

The length of the server maintenance means that, hopefully, Riot will be able to tackle the issue in enough time, but there's always a chance that the League of Legends servers remain down slightly longer into the afternoon.

Elsewhere, a former League of Legends pro is naming his son after the character that made him world champ.