If you are a player in the popular free-to-play fantasy action-RTS game League of Legends, you know that there have been a number of recent issues with the game. They include extended outages for the North American servers along with players waiting for a long time to actually play the game, not to mention some players that are missing in-game content such as champions, runes and more.
In a forum post this week on the League of Legends site, Riot Games said the issues started after the developer released a recent patch to the game. The post said that the patch caused problems that were " ... database-related – specifically, it’s a data throughput issue. Our infrastructure handles a massive volume of data and requests every day, and the backend changes in this patch introduced a new bottleneck."
The post added that the company has since made "substantial hardware configuration changes" but added that the team wants to be "absolutely confident in our solution before signaling the all-clear. Our number one priority is restoration of a stable game experience."
League of Legends launched in 2009. In November 2011, Riot Games announced that League of Legends had over 30 million registered players with a peak of over 1.3 million players online at one time. It"s more than likely that number has gone up since then.
Source: League of Legends forums