Is League of Legends down right now?

Yes. HostTracker lets you add any URL - including third-party services you depend on, not just your own website - as a monitored target, and notifies you automatically the moment it becomes unreachable. Before sending an alert, HostTracker re-verifies a failure from multiple locations in its 300+-location network, so you're notified about real, confirmed outages rather than a single location's momentary blip. The free plan checks two monitors every 30 minutes indefinitely at no cost; paid plans check as often as once a minute, with alerts available through SMS, email, voice call, and several messenger apps.

A queue means the opposite of down: the servers are up and deliberately admitting players in a controlled sequence rather than letting a surge overwhelm them. Queues appear after patches, at regional peak hours and while recovering from an earlier incident, and they normally clear on their own. Leaving the queue and rejoining puts you at the back, so waiting is genuinely the faster option. A real outage looks different - the client cannot connect at all, or errors out rather than placing you in an orderly line with a position and an estimate.

Because the game is served regionally and those servers fail independently. Each region has its own game servers and infrastructure, so an incident affecting one leaves players elsewhere entirely unaffected - which is why cross-region comparisons are useful evidence rather than a contradiction. If your region is out, there is nothing to fix on your side and playing on another region generally is not an option for a ranked account. Checking reachability of the publisher's own services from multiple locations helps separate a regional game-server incident from a network problem between you and them.