Riot Games Login Outage Traced to Expired SSL Certificate

Riot Games suffered a widespread service disruption after failing to renew an expired digital certificate in time, with the certificate expiring on 4 January 2026 and all HTTPS connections subsequently rejected. The immediate effect was that the League of Legends client could no longer connect to the servers.

The outage was not the first such incident, as Riot previously faced a certificate renewal lapse in January 2016, and the replacement then issued was set to expire in January 2026, despite earlier assurances that automatic renewal would prevent recurrence.

The client certificate used by Riot is self-signed, a setup that could allow a certificate valid for many years but raises private key risk, and under CA/Browser Forum rules, certificates issued from 2028 will have a maximum validity of 47 days excluding root and intermediate certificates.

An emergency fix was coordinated by a Riot Games employee after user complaints on Reddit, and server connectivity was restored after several hours of downtime, though some players may still see “unknown player” messages until updates and correct system time are applied.