Major Riot Games blunder saw League of Legends down for a day

Jack Stewart, Senior Editor

Last Updated: 06/01/2026

A big mistake by Riot Games meant that League of Legends went down and was unplayable for a full day.

On January 4th, the final day of the holidays before many returned to work, LoL players couldn’t load the client.

As it turns out, Riot Games had forgotten to renew the certificate which allowed the client to function.

After 10 years, the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate had expired, leaving LoL players stuck in a loop while trying to log in.

This isn’t the first time LoL has had this issue, either, as LoL shut down 10 years ago because Riot hadn’t renewed the certificate.

That was back in 2016, as Riot engineer Brent ‘Brentmeister’ Randall reassured fans back then that the game hadn’t died:

“We’re aware of this and taking a look now! Appears our cert expired for the new year when it should have auto-renewed. Happy New Years Redditors!”

However, Riot embarrassingly hadn’t learnt from this mistake, as clearly any planned auto-renewal failed once again.

Still, this didn’t stop some savvy LoL players from continuing to play as the community quickly found a workaround.

Fans had to ‘time travel’ and set the dates of their PCs back in time to January 3rd for the LoL client to successfully load.

Now, this isn’t necessary as a day later and the game is back online with a brand new SSL certificate for the client.

This time, Riot Games has taken no chances and set up a 100-year certificate for the game, taking LoL all the way to the year 2125.

Not that it should be necessary with a League of Legends rework aka ‘League of Legends 2’, coming soon.

League of Legends in 2026

The game is now back up and running, and it isn’t long until LoL enters its 16th season.

The 2026 season is bringing massive changes to LoL with the patch dropping Thursday January 8th.

And that’s not even including the recent addition of WASD controls to some unranked modes.

The biggest of all the upcoming changes is role quests with missions for every in-game role, not just junglers and supports.

Some of these break the game with toplaners exceeding the level cap and ADCs being given a 7th item.

These, along with a ranked system update, minion spawn time changes, and turret changes, should completely refresh the MOBA.

The 2026 season will also be Demacian-themed with a new cinematic due to release soon.

Jack Stewart, Senior Editor

In my seven years of esports writing, I've introduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I'm most proud of the latter.

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