League of Legends went down because someone forgot a security certificate that was about to expire

On January 4, everyone simultaneously lost the ability to log in to League of Legends. This occurred during Riot Games' annual vacation, so presumably, the live operations team wasn't at 100% when this alert came in. A systems engineer on-call on the last day of their vacation probably received a barrage of messages to fix an issue that made the game unplayable. And in the end? It turns out Riot simply forgot that their SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate for the League of Legends client was expiring on January 4, which means no one could access the client until it was renewed. It's somewhat amusing that a multimillion-dollar company like Riot Games didn't have an alarm or alert configured to warn of this event, but unfortunately. This same scenario occurred exactly ten years ago , when the client's last security certificate expired without Riot knowing. At that moment, engineer Brent "Brentmeister" Randall wrote: "We're aware and we're looking into it! It appears our certificate expired for New Year's when it should have been automatically renewed. Happy New Year, Redditors!" League of Legends content creator Vandiril revealed that the certificate had expired and made a video explaining that you could still access the game if you changed your PC's clock to "go back in time". Obviously, this causes a multitude of problems with other programs. Still, if you were desperate to play a League of Legends match with other users who already had sessions logged in on the client when the certificate expired, it was a valid option. Fortunately, the problem has already been solved and League of Legends is available again. Personally, I hope people are reading a similar news item about another expired certificate in 2036, following Lee "Faker" Sang-hyeok's sixteenth victory at the World Championship.The Gamer