Is VALORANT down right now?

Where this comes from

Every figure on this page is read live from Riot's public status feed — the same source that powers the official status site and the notices you see in the client. Your browser fetches it directly from Riot when the page loads, so nothing is cached by us and nothing is a stale copy.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Most pages ranking for this question either show a status that was true when the page was published, or run an uptime robot that pings a server and infers health from whether it answers. Neither reflects what Riot has actually declared, which is why they routinely show green during a real outage.

A region we cannot reach is shown as unknown rather than as healthy. Reporting "all up" on a request that failed is the one genuinely harmful thing a status page can do, and it is a surprisingly common way for these pages to be wrong.

Is it the servers, or is it you?

If the board above shows your region as healthy and you still cannot play, the problem is somewhere between your machine and Riot rather than at Riot. Work down this list in order — it is arranged by how likely each cause is, not by how easy it is to check.

1. 1

   Check your own region, not just the headline

   Outages are frequently regional. Europe can be down while North America is untouched, so the only status that matters to you is the one for the region you actually queue in. The board above breaks it out per region for exactly this reason.

2. 2

   See whether other people are affected

   If Riot has not declared an incident but a great many players are reporting the same thing, the incident may simply be newer than the declaration. Riot's own feed is authoritative but not instantaneous — it lags a genuine outage by minutes rather than seconds.

3. 3

   Restart the client, not just the game

   Closing VALORANT leaves the Riot Client running, and a stale client session causes a large share of the errors people read as outages. Quit both, then relaunch. If you were in a match, you can reconnect — abandoning is far more costly than the reconnect is slow.

4. 4

   Test your connection independently

   A connection that loads web pages fine can still be dropping the small, frequent packets a shooter depends on. Wired rather than wireless, no downloads running, and a router restart are the cheap checks worth doing before assuming anything about Riot.

5. 5

   Check Vanguard is actually running

   VALORANT will not connect if its anti-cheat is not loaded, and the resulting error looks like a server problem rather than a local one. A full restart of your machine — not a relaunch of the game — is what reliably fixes it, because Vanguard loads at boot.

If you have a specific error code rather than a general failure, our connection error guidecovers the common ones and what each actually means.

Scheduled maintenance and patch downtime

Not every outage is a fault. Riot takes servers down deliberately for patches, and that downtime is announced in advance through the same feed this page reads — which is why a scheduled window appears here as maintenance rather than as an incident.

Patch downtime runs regionally and staggered rather than globally at once, so your region's window may be hours away from another's. It typically lands in the early morning for the region concerned, which minimises the number of people affected but does mean the timing looks arbitrary from anywhere else.

Maintenance windows are also the one kind of downtime worth planning around. If you are close to a promotion or trying to finish a battle pass before an act ends, it is worth knowing that the servers will be unavailable for a stretch on patch day.

Patch timing usually follows the act cycle — our patch notes pagetracks what changed in each one.

What Riot's severity levels mean

Riot tags every incident with a severity, and the labels are not self-explanatory. The board above uses Riot's own classification rather than inventing one:

Info

Something is being reported or investigated, but play is broadly unaffected. Most entries that sit on the feed for days are this — a known issue with a specific feature rather than an outage.

Warning

A real problem affecting a meaningful number of players, without the service being down. Queue times, connectivity for some players, or a broken feature would sit here.

Critical

The service is substantially unavailable. If you cannot log in or cannot queue at all and your region is marked critical, waiting is the only available action.

Maintenance

Planned downtime, announced ahead of time. Distinct from an incident because it is intentional and has a known end, even where the practical effect on you is identical.

On VPNs, ping boosters and the rest

Search for this question and most of what you will find is selling something — a VPN, a "ping booster", a route optimiser. It is worth being clear about what those can and cannot do, because the pitch is usually made against a problem they do not solve.

If Riot's servers are down, nothing routed differently will help. There is no path to a server that is not accepting connections, and no product changes that. During an actual outage, these tools are selling a fix for something that is not fixable from your end.

Where routing can genuinely matter is a persistently bad path to a server that is up — consistent packet loss on your ISP's route rather than an outage. That is a real if uncommon problem, and it is a different one from the question this page answers. It is also worth knowing that Riot's terms take a dim view of tools that inject themselves into the game's network stack, so the risk is not only that it does not work.