League of Legends, Riot Games' successful and well known MOBA with over 130 million monthly players, came to a halt temporarily on January 4th, 2026, as a widespread login outage prevented millions from accessing the game. Reports surged on Downdetector, peaking at over 7,000 complaints, with 81% citing game launch failures and the rest server connections or crashes. Players worldwide from North America to EUW faced frozen clients stuck on loading screens, failed authentications, and inability to even open the Riot Client.
Riot acknowledged the chaos via an official tweet: "We’re aware of an issue that’s impacting games and preventing some players from logging in. Ranked queues are temporarily disabled while we work on a fix. Thanks for your patience." Despite this, the company's status page showed "No recent issues or events to report," drawing further ire from the community. The outage, which began midday and persisted for over four hours in some regions, also affected Teamfight Tactics (TFT) for many users.
Community sleuthing quickly uncovered the culprit: an expired SSL client certificate on Riot's end. As certificates have validity dates for security, the lapse triggered validation failures post January 4th rollover. Data miners and tech-savvy players, including content creator Vandiril, confirmed the issue through client debugging. A popular workaround emerged, manually setting your computer's date back to January 3rd allows the client to authenticate before "noticing" the expiration. Steps include disabling automatic date/time, reverting to yesterday, launching the game, then resetting to current. Users warned it's temporary and not fully secure, as Riot pushed updates potentially breaking it further. Players had to pull a Zilean trick out to get in the game. Check out Vandiril's video about it down below:
Streamers and casuals alike vented, with posts like "I CANT OPEN LEAGUE OF LEGENDS" garnering thousands of likes amid the prime weekend gaming window. Some speculated ties to broader Cloudflare or AWS glitches affecting services like Overwatch 2 and Valorant, but they were all wrong as League's issue appears isolated to the cert fiasco.
This is not Riot's first rodeo with client woes past patches have sparked similar login queues and Vanguard anti-cheat hiccups but an expired cert stands out as a preventable embarrassment. As Season 16 ramps up with fresh patches, the timing exacerbates tensions, especially with ARAM Mayhem ending soon. Temporary fixes like repairing via Hextech Tool or full reinstalls did not work for most players.
As of right now, some regions reported partial recovery. Riot continues deploying backend fixes, urging patience. For now, affected players can monitor @LeagueOfLegends or Downdetector for ETAs. In a live service era demanding 24/7 uptime, this glitch underscores the fragility of even juggernaut titles though the community's quick hacks kept the memes flowing. Speaking of recent live service fiascos, Rainbow Six Siege was recently hacked again...
What are your thoughts on the downtime for League Of Legends? Do you think the dedicated players got to touch grass and shower or did they just simply wait for the servers to come back up before queueing again? Let us know why Mel is the most annoying character in the game by leaving a comment down below!