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Sometimes the biggest gaming disasters don’t come from server crashes or cyberattacks. Sometimes they come from someone forgetting to check a calendar.
League of Legends players worldwide found themselves staring at frozen loading screens late Sunday as the game refused to let them login. Millions of players across every region encountered the same wall. No error message explaining the problem. No estimated fix time. Just an endless loading screen and growing frustration as prime gaming hours ticked away.
The culprit? An expired SSL certificate that someone at Riot Games apparently forgot to renew. And here’s the kicker: this exact same thing happened ten years ago.
What actually went wrong
For those unfamiliar with the technical details, SSL certificates function like digital ID cards for secure internet connections. When your computer connects to a website or service, both sides verify each other’s credentials through these certificates. It’s the “S” in HTTPS, the padlock icon in your browser, the thing keeping your data secure from interception.
These certificates expire. They require renewal. This is neither a surprise nor a recent development in how the internet works. Certificate expiration dates are known well in advance, specifically because forgetting to renew them breaks everything.
The League of Legends client uses a somewhat unusual setup where it essentially acts as both a web browser and web server on your local machine. Web elements get hosted locally and then requested for display. For reasons that remain unclear, Riot configured this entirely local traffic to require secure HTTPS connections, meaning it depends on a valid SSL certificate.
That certificate expired as 2025 arrived. Windows did exactly what it should do when encountering an expired security certificate: it rejected the connection. The result? Nobody could play League of Legends.
Players diagnosed the problem faster than Riot fixed it
While Riot’s official response amounted to “we’re looking into it,” the player community had already identified the root cause by digging through client error logs. The expired certificate was visible in the technical data. Some enterprising players even discovered a workaround: setting their system clock back to before the expiration date allowed logins to succeed.
This grassroots troubleshooting effort speaks to both the technical sophistication of the League community and the absurdity of the situation. Players shouldn’t need to manipulate their system time to access a game because someone forgot basic infrastructure maintenance.
Timeline of the incident:
| Event | Timing |
|---|---|
| Certificate expiration | New Year transition |
| Player reports emerge | Late Sunday |
| Community identifies cause | Within hours |
| Riot acknowledges issue | Shortly after reports |
| Fix deployed | Several hours later |
The eventual fix apparently involved updating the certificate’s expiration date to 2125. Whether that’s a joke about never wanting to deal with this again or simply the most aggressive renewal period possible remains unclear. Either way, assuming Riot still exists in a century and League of Legends somehow persists, future engineers will inherit this particular time bomb.
The embarrassing part: Riot did this exact thing in 2016
Corporate memory is notoriously short, but forgetting a lesson from just ten years ago feels particularly egregious.
On New Year’s Day 2016, League of Legends players encountered the same problem. SSL certificate expiration popups appeared. Logins failed. Riot confirmed on Reddit that their “cert expired for the new year when it should have auto-renewed.”
That response from 2016 suggests awareness of the need for automatic renewal processes. Yet here we are in 2026, experiencing identical symptoms from what appears to be identical negligence. Whatever systems or reminders were supposedly put in place after the 2016 incident clearly failed to prevent recurrence.
The League client underwent significant updates between then and now, which might explain how institutional knowledge about this particular certificate got lost. But that explanation doesn’t excuse the outcome. Critical infrastructure maintenance shouldn’t depend on individual memory or survive only as long as specific employees remain at the company.
Why this matters beyond inconvenience
An evening without League of Legends won’t end anyone’s life. Players found other games, touched grass, or simply complained on Reddit until the fix arrived. The immediate stakes were low.
The broader implications deserve more attention.
League of Legends remains one of the most-played games on Earth. Its esports ecosystem involves professional players, team organizations, broadcasters, and sponsors who depend on the game functioning reliably. Imagine this happening during a major tournament broadcast. The reputational and financial damage would dwarf some angry Reddit posts.
More fundamentally, this incident reveals something about how even massive gaming companies manage their technical infrastructure. Certificate renewal is not an obscure edge case. It’s a known requirement with known deadlines that every significant web service must handle. Automated monitoring should flag approaching expirations. Multiple redundant systems should ensure someone notices before problems occur.
That Riot apparently lacks these safeguards, or that they failed spectacularly at the most predictable possible moment (a calendar year transition), raises questions about what other basic maintenance might be similarly neglected.
The gaming industry’s infrastructure problem
Riot isn’t uniquely incompetent. Similar incidents have plagued companies across the tech industry. Microsoft, Google, and countless others have experienced certificate-related outages when someone forgot to click “renew” or automated systems failed silently.
The gaming industry specifically faces infrastructure challenges stemming from its entertainment-focused culture. Game companies hire for creative talent, game design expertise, and development skills. The backend infrastructure supporting millions of concurrent players often receives less attention and investment than the games themselves.
This creates situations where brilliant game designers build incredible experiences atop infrastructure held together with digital duct tape and prayers. When everything works, nobody notices. When certificates expire or servers crash, suddenly the fragility becomes visible.
What should happen next
Riot will presumably implement better monitoring this time. They’ll set calendar reminders, configure automated alerts, maybe even establish redundant notification systems. The 2125 expiration date suggests someone decided to simply push the problem a century into the future rather than build proper renewal infrastructure.
That’s a bandaid, not a solution. The underlying issue isn’t this specific certificate but rather organizational processes that allowed a known deadline to pass unnoticed. Fix the process and future certificates get renewed automatically. Ignore the process and different failures emerge from the same root cause.
The gaming community, meanwhile, will remember this incident for approximately two weeks before the next controversy demands attention. That’s how these cycles work. Outrage flares, subsides, and companies return to business as usual until the next preventable failure.
Ten years from now, if League of Legends still exists and Riot still operates it, we might discover whether they finally learned this particular lesson. The pattern so far doesn’t inspire confidence.
For now, players can login again. The emergency passed. And somewhere in Riot’s offices, someone is probably writing a very awkward incident report explaining how they repeated a decade-old mistake that had an obvious solution: check the calendar.
