A surprisingly simple oversight left League of Legends players without servers right in the middle of the holidays. Riot failed to renew a key digital certificate, then fixed the issue in a way that should prevent a repeat for the next hundred years.

League of Legends players had to find something else to do on Sunday night. At around 9:00 PM Spanish time, the servers went down worldwide and did not return to normal until deep into the early hours of the morning. For many, the outage brought back memories of a time more than a decade ago, when incidents like this were far more common.

At first, the situation did not seem especially serious. That changed once the true cause became clear, revealing a colossal mistake that few would expect from a developer of Riot’s scale.

League Of Legends Ran Out Of Digital Certificates

The outage was not caused by a cyberattack or a complex technical failure, but by a simple oversight. Riot Games allowed the SSL certificate tied to the game client to expire. This widely used security protocol encrypts data and verifies the identity of a service.

In reality, the servers were functioning the entire time, but connections to them were blocked for security reasons. This became apparent when some players discovered that changing the date on their Windows system clock allowed them to log in and even play matches. Following this, many users checked the League of Legends client’s certificate status and confirmed that Riot had simply forgotten to renew it.

How could something like this happen? The most likely explanation is the winter break. Every year, Riot operates with minimal staff during the holiday season, and this time the break lasted from December 19 to January 5. Under those circumstances, it is easy to imagine the renewal deadline being missed.

The good news is that this specific problem is unlikely to affect players again in their lifetime. Riot renewed the SSL certificate for 100 years, setting the new expiration date to 2125. The bigger question now is how many champions the game will have by then.

Source: 3djuegos