Is League Down? Riot Confirms Recent DDoS Attack
Imagine you queue up for a solo-queue match as a jungler. The early game goes perfectly. Your lanes are winning trades, your ganks secure kills or force summoner spells, and you’re two levels ahead after invading the enemy jungle with ease. Victory feels close, and for once, your teammates aren’t flaming each other. Then your champion freezes. The minimap stops updating. Your teammates’ pings disappear, replaced by the looping blue “reconnecting” bar. You restart, rejoin, and the same thing happens again. Meanwhile, the enemy team continues to play without any issues. What should have been an effortless win turns into a 20-LP loss, not because of mistakes, but because the servers failed to keep up.
On the evening of October 6, League of Legends began experiencing widespread issues. Gamers from North America to Latin America and Brazil reported extreme lag, abrupt disconnections, and match instability. Riot product lead Drew Levin confirmed a DDoS attack was underway. Although the issue was briefly resolved, the servers were attacked again soon after. Levin later clarified that it wasn’t just North America being targeted but also EUNE, EUW, TR, RU, LA, and BR servers.
This was not the first time League of Legends' infrastructure has been tested. Over the past year, many players noticed server reliability slipping. The DDoS attacks may come and go, but problems like lag, packet loss, and ping spikes have gradually become more common. Aside from the DDoS attack, the game has been experiencing server issues consistently over the last couple of months. And the game’s slow support doesn't help either.
Why are server problems getting worse?
1. Attack sophistication and scale have increased.
Modern DDoS campaigns are multi-vector, saturating both bandwidth and connection tracking. Attackers often target not just Riot’s servers but upstream network nodes, transit links, or distributed infrastructure. This makes normal traffic filtering harder without collateral damage.
2. Distributed routing and ISP backhaul stress.
Even if Riot’s own servers hold up, attacks on their upstream providers or backbone networks can force rerouting or packet drops. Players can perceive that as Riot’s servers failing, even when the issue lies in intermediary networks.
3. Infrastructure aging or stretched resources.
Game services like League scale globally, but demand grows fast. Without constant hardware refresh, regional load balancing upgrades, or extra headroom, edge servers and peering setups can bottleneck under attack or surges.
4. Reactive patchwork rather than preemptive defense.
Some improvements are made after big incidents; full overhauls of architecture take time, funding, and risk. In the interim, Riot and peers scramble to deploy rules, filters, or blackholing strategies when attacks hit.
Player base reactions
Players across social media described similar issues. Ping would jump from around 40 ms to as high as 800 ms mid-match, causing delayed actions, frozen screens, and sudden disconnects. In many cases, some players stayed connected while others were kicked out, which made matches feel unfair and lopsided.
Those who were penalized for leaving or losing because of these disconnects were among the most vocal. They turned to Riot’s forums and Reddit threads asking for loss prevention measures, LP refunds, or rank restoration, arguing that the problem stemmed from server instability rather than player behavior.
What should Riot do?
If Riot wants to restore confidence, they must move beyond reactive statements to long-term investment in resilient infrastructure:
- Disable queues fast when problems like this arise
- Expand edge server capacity and global peering
- Automate attack detection and filtering without collateral disruption
- Offer compensation (rank safety, LP protection) when outages cost players
- Provide faster updates on the server status page
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