League of Legends crashed because someone forgot a security certificate that was about to expire.
In a world of advanced cyberattacks, sophisticated network technology, and more code than any one person can manage, many factors can cause a multiplayer game to temporarily disconnect. However, on rare occasions, these game-threatening issues are much simpler than one might think.
On January 4th, everyone simultaneously lost the ability to log into League of Legends. This occurred during Riot Games’ annual holiday, so presumably, the live operations team wasn’t fully operational when the alert came in. A systems engineer on call during the last day of their vacation likely received a barrage of messages to fix an issue that rendered the game unplayable.
And the outcome? It turns out Riot simply forgot that its SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate for the League of Legends client expired on January 4th, meaning no one could access the client until it was renewed. It’s ironic that a multi-billion dollar company like Riot Games didn’t have an alert set up to notify users of this event, but unfortunately.
This same scenario occurred exactly ten years ago, when the client’s last security certificate expired without Riot’s knowledge. At the time, engineer Brent “Brentmeister” Randall wrote: “We are aware and are looking into it! It appears our certificate expired for the new year when it should have been automatically renewed. Happy New Year, Redditors!”
And what happened in the end? It turns out Riot simply forgot that its SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate for the League of Legends client expired on January 4th, meaning no one could access the client until it was renewed. It’s ironic that a multi-billion dollar company like Riot Games didn’t have an alert set up to notify users of this event, but unfortunately, that’s what happened.
League of Legends content creator Vandiril revealed that the certificate had expired and made a video explaining that you could still access the game by changing your PC’s clock to “go back in time.”
Obviously, this caused a multitude of problems with other programs. Even so, if you were desperate to play a League of Legends match with other users who were already logged into the client when the certificate expired, it was a viable option.
Fortunately, the problem has now been resolved, and League of Legends is available again. Personally, I hope people are reading a similar news story about another certificate expiring in 2036, following Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok’s sixteenth World Championship victory.