On January 4, 2026, the popular online game League of Legends had a major service outage that kept players from being able to play for about a day. Reports from community and gaming news sites say that the outage happened because Riot Games didn’t renew an important security certificate that the game client needs to work right.
The problem stopped players all over the world from loading the client or logging in. It happened on the last day of the holiday season, which is when a lot of players usually come back to play after taking a break.
Riot Games had hoped that the certificate would automatically renew, but the process didn’t go as planned. Because of the lapse, the old certificate stopped the game client from connecting to Riot’s servers, which caused the outage.
Players who wanted to get around the problem found that changing the date on their computer to January 3rd made the client load for a short time while the problem was being fixed.
Riot Games fixed the problem by installing a new SSL certificate with a longer validity period about 24 hours after it started. The new certificate is good until 2125, which is meant to stop problems like this from happening again in the future.
The blackout was a rare but big technical mistake for Riot. Historical records show that a similar certificate expiration made League of Legends unavailable about ten years ago.
Once the new certificate was in place, players could get back into the game as usual, and Riot confirmed that the service was working again.
This event shows how important it is to regularly manage certificates to keep online games available, especially for games with a lot of active players.
Source: https://esports-news.co.uk/2026/01/05/riot-games-blunder-took-lol-down-for-a-day/
