league-of-legends

Expired SSL certificate knocks League of Legends offline for many players

On January 4, 2026, League of Legends became unavailable for many players after an expired SSL certificate blocked secure connections to Riot Games' servers. The outage duplicated a similar SSL expiry incident that affected the game in 2016. The disruption prevented players from launching or connecting to matches and highlights the operational risk of certificate-management failures for live online services.

• Date and impact: On January 4, 2026, many League of Legends players could not access the game.
• Cause: An expired SSL certificate prevented secure connections to Riot Games' services.
• Historical repeat: The outage mirrored an SSL certificate error that hit League of Legends in 2016, ten years earlier.
• Consequence: Certificate-management failures can directly block player access to live online games and services.