There are many reasons that could lead to League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra, VALORANT, and League of Legends: Wild Rift going down. If playing any of those games is your off-day (or weekend) activity, and if the server status flashes red, it can be extremely frustrating.

How to check Riot Games servers’ status

To determine whether the issue is on your end, or if the disconnections are affecting many players, there are two websites worth noting:

• Riot Games’ League of Legends Server Status site: The website covers all Riot Games properties—LoL, LoL: Wild Rift, VALORANT, or LoR. The website usually shows when the company notices a widespread issue, and it generally elaborates on it a little.
• Downdetector by ookla: Made by the same people that made SpeedTest, Downdetector is a great resource, sometimes alerting people of currently ongoing outages before Riot Games does. Unlike Riot’s resource, notifications are on separate pages, and they don’t include LoR:
  • notifications for League of Legends
  • notifications for VALORANT
  • notifications for LoL: Wild Rift
• Twitter: Riot Games has a unified Twitter feed for outages, at times acting before the server status website listed above. Be sure to follow it for any issues with Riot’s games overall.

The servers are up, but the game isn’t working. Why?

Unfortunately, some issues are not on Riot Games’ side, but on a player’s network. This can be due to several reasons:

• The Internet Service Provider (ISP) is holding a maintenance of sorts, or there is massive throttling towards Riot’s servers.
• If attempting to play from a campus, the ports might be blocked.
• Something is going awry with the computer. Sometimes, a simple reboot, or a DNS cache flush will do the trick.

In the cases above, the following instructions from Riot Games can help.

Failing which, these might. Proceed with caution if tech is a mystery.

And, sometimes, the issue has nothing to do with Riot or yourself, but with your location. As far as League of Legends is concerned, this applies to China, South Korea, and some Garena servers. League of Legends is not down: those servers are geographically locked.

For instance, the Vietnamese server does not allow access to people outside Vietnam. Likewise, an account in China and South Korea requires the possession of a social security number within that country.