League of Legends players found themselves locked out of the game on 5 January after a widespread login outage, and the root cause turned out to be surprisingly mundane.
According to the reports, the developers failed to renew a security SSL certificate, which caused the client to reject connections once the certificate expired. Players instantly conjured Zilean’s powers, who is League’s time-bending champion, to fix the problem, as such a basic maintenance oversight could bring one of the world’s biggest live service games to a halt.
As reports spread across social media and community forums like Reddit, players quickly identified the issue themselves, even though the developers didn’t explicitly state the reason for the outrage and shared an unusual fix. By setting their system clocks back to an earlier date, the client no longer detected the expired certificate and allowed players to log in.
The workaround spread rapidly, prompting jokes that the community had effectively pulled a real-life Chronoshift on the game to play it while it was down.
Riot acknowledged the issue on X and confirmed that they’re aware of the problem and are disabling ranked until further notice, while deploying a fix later to restore normal service. While outages are not uncommon for online games, the simplicity of the reason and the fact that a similar issue occurred a decade ago made this one stand out, particularly given League’s global scale and its competitive importance to players.
This time, Riot has made sure history will not repeat itself anytime soon. The renewed certificate is now valid for the next 100 years, pushing the problem all the way to 2125, which should be more than enough time for someone at Riot to set a calendar reminder for the next update or let Zilean handle it next time.
