Fans were having issues getting into matches of League of Legends today, and developer Riot had to pull one of the world’s most popular games offline to perform emergency maintenance.
The multiplayer arena battler has had a number of connection and stability issues since Riot introduced the 4.20 patch earlier this week. That update changed the map and is trying to introduce a number of ways for teams to win, but people haven’t had a lot of luck getting into League of Legends. Players have run into errors when trying to get into matchmaking all day today — although, Riot says things are back online now. The League of Legends in-game store is still offline. While that affects fans less, it is not a good thing for a game that made nearly $950 million through the first nine months of 2014.
Prior to the fix, players were waiting in matchmaking for up to a half hour without ever getting into a game.
Until minutes ago, Riot’s server status had this message:
“We’re aware of issues with matchmaking and are working on resolving the issue now. We’ll be performing an emergency maintenance momentarily. This will help resolve the current matchmaking issues that have been occurring. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to restore service as soon as possible.”
Now, with everyone coming back online at the same time, players are encountering massive queues to get into matches.
League of Legends is in its “preseason” right now, and many teams are trying to get into the highly competitive e-sports game for practice. It’s likely that a combination of the new patch and user demand are causing League’s issues.