Some of you may have noticed that League of Legends was down all over the world on January 4, 2026. This happened due to an expired client certificate that blocked the player’s login attempt. Riot has confirmed the problem and disabled ranked gameplay.
League of Legends was Down
Having issues like the one from one day ago is definitely not common in League of Legends. With that said, January 4, 2026 was a date when players had to deal with a widespread login issue. This prevented millions from accessing Riot’s client, so it was no surprise there were over 7000 complaints on Downdetector. It seems like everyone from NA to EU had frozen clients stuck on the loading screen.
The good news is that Riot Games has acknowledged the issue. The company released an official tweet where it stated that it is aware of the problem and is working on a fix. Riot also mentioned that the ranked queues will be temporarily disabled while working on the fix. Aside from League of Legends, the outage also affected Teamfight Tactics, another game from Riot.
What Caused the Issue?
The LoL community decided to dive deep into the issue and found that Riot had an expired SSL. A lot of people confirmed this has been the problem by doing client debugging and found a workaround. Everyone who wanted to access the game had to change their computer’s date to January 3, 2026.
There were speculations that Riot may be suffering from the Cloudflare issue that affected Calorant and Overwatch 2 before. This, however, was not the case.
As of now, it seems like most regions do not have the issue anymore, but there are exceptions. We recommend following Riot’s official X account because they will let you know as soon as everything is up and running. Until then, make sure to follow us regularly.
