Players of Riot Games’ tactical shooter “Valorant” began reporting connectivity problems Monday night, with outage-tracking service Downdetector flagging a spike in user complaints starting at 8:24 p.m. Eastern time and the hashtag #ValorantDown trending on social platform X as affected players compared notes on the disruption.

Downdetector’s official account posted an alert shortly after the spike began, asking users how the outage was affecting them and directing them to submit reports through the platform. As of the post, the alert had drawn attention across social media, though the exact scope, cause and expected duration of the disruption had not yet been detailed in any official statement from Riot Games at the time the outage began trending.

Riot Games, the publisher behind “Valorant,” maintains a dedicated Service Status page where the company posts real-time updates on server health, ongoing maintenance and confirmed outages across its game titles, including region-specific status information for players around the world. During past outages, the company has typically used that page, along with its official support accounts on social media, to acknowledge disruptions and provide updates as engineering teams investigate the underlying cause.

Riot’s infrastructure is built to support millions of concurrent players across “Valorant” and the company’s other titles, and outright server outages remain relatively uncommon compared with smaller, localized connectivity issues. Even so, the game has experienced a range of disruptions over the past several years, with causes spanning routine scheduled maintenance tied to major content patches, unexpected server errors during periods of unusually high player traffic, and, in at least two previously documented incidents, broader connectivity problems linked to issues with Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company whose services Riot’s servers have relied on. In one such earlier incident, outage tracking showed disrupted service lasting roughly three hours before connections began stabilizing, with a brief recurrence of the issue several hours later.

Not every reported connectivity problem traces back to an issue on Riot’s end. The company and third-party guides covering “Valorant’s” server status commonly note that local network configurations, virtual private network or proxy interference, home network congestion and outdated game clients can each produce symptoms that resemble a broader server outage even when Riot’s infrastructure itself remains fully operational. Players experiencing connection issues are typically advised to first check Riot’s official status page and Downdetector’s live outage tracker to determine whether a problem is affecting a broad swath of the player base or appears limited to their own individual setup, before attempting local troubleshooting steps such as restarting the game client and Riot Client launcher, disabling any active VPN or proxy services, and closing unnecessary background applications that may be competing for network bandwidth.

Downdetector, the crowdsourced outage-tracking platform that first flagged Monday night’s disruption, aggregates user-submitted problem reports alongside automated signals to identify spikes in complaints for a given service, generating real-time alerts when reports for a platform exceed typical baseline levels. The service has become a widely used first stop for gamers and other internet users seeking to quickly confirm whether a disruption they are experiencing reflects a broader, service-wide issue rather than a problem isolated to their own device or internet connection.

“Valorant” has built a large and highly engaged competitive player base since its 2020 launch, with the free-to-play tactical shooter regularly ranking among the most-played titles on PC gaming platforms and supporting an active professional esports circuit organized by Riot Games. That scale means even relatively short outages tend to generate significant social media attention and player frustration, particularly when disruptions occur during peak evening play hours in North America, as Monday night’s reported issues appeared to.

As of the most recent available information, Riot Games had not issued a detailed public statement specifying the root cause of Monday night’s reported outage, and it remained unclear whether the disruption was affecting all regions simultaneously or was concentrated in specific areas. Players seeking the most current and authoritative updates on the situation were directed to Riot’s official Valorant Service Status page, which the company updates directly, rather than relying solely on third-party trackers or social media speculation, which can lag behind or occasionally misrepresent the actual scope of an ongoing technical issue.

Riot Games has historically resolved server-side outages affecting “Valorant” within a period ranging from under an hour to several hours, depending on the underlying cause, with the company’s engineering teams typically posting incremental updates as investigations progress and services are gradually restored across affected regions. Whether Monday night’s reported issues would follow that same pattern remained unclear as reports of the outage continued to circulate online.

For players still experiencing connection problems, standard troubleshooting guidance from both Riot Games and independent gaming outlets recommends confirming server status through official channels first, since attempting extensive local fixes during a genuine server-side outage typically has no effect until Riot’s own infrastructure issues are resolved on the company’s end.

Now try the same sentence with a different noun. The UK will grow its healthcare exports to £40 billion a year by 2030.

Something in the British throat closes.

Services are roughly three-fifths of everything the UK sells abroad. Business services — law, accountancy, consultancy, R&D, advertising — are the single largest export category we have, at around £194bn. Financial services add another £104bn. We are, in trade terms, a country that has industrialised the export of clever people doing clever things in offices.

With one very large exception.

The patients are going the other way

The best available academic work on this is a study published in PLOS ONE, which did the unglamorous job of filing freedom-of-information requests to 28 NHS foundation trusts. Its finding: Britain is a net exporter of patients. Inbound international patients made up about 7% of private patient volume in the hospitals studied and generated close to a quarter of the private patient income. That is the segment you build a growth plan around.

Ankara’s business model

Between 2012 and 2024 the number of international patients travelling to Turkey from the UK rose roughly sixfold, to about 1.5 million a year, generating in the region of $3bn. The Trade Ministry has been explicit that this is an export industry, and treats it like one: in 2022 it extended export incentives that had previously gone to healthcare investors so that they also covered health tourism agencies, reaching more than 1,200 of them.

But the policy is only half the story. Turkey teeth packages are constructed with a clinical scope, a number of nights in a hotel, a written guarantee and a single number. A spokesperson at One Life Dental, a European agency specialized in full mouth dental implants in Turkey, stresses the importance of the holiday package for British patients: ‘there are daily flight to Turkey from over 12 UK airports, most of them to coastal holiday locations.’

Three things a service needs before it can leave the country

It has to be buyable by a stranger. Can someone 2,000 miles away work out what they are getting, what it costs, and what happens if it goes wrong, without speaking to a human first? We have convinced ourselves that bespoke and unpriced is a mark of quality. Abroad, it mostly reads as evasive.

Someone has to classify it as an export. Education got a strategy, a dedicated trade unit and a ministerial champion, and grew. Healthcare got a waiting list. The difference in outcomes is the UK’s clinical reputation is, if anything, more famous than its educational one –– but for the wrong motives.

Trust has to travel. Regulation, recourse and accreditation are the infrastructure of any cross-border service. We have world-respected versions of all three in Britain.

Who captures the value

“Exporting healthcare” sounds uncomfortably like selling the NHS. But we have already had this argument, in another sector, and resolved it. International students pay a premium that cross-subsidises domestic provision; that is the justification for treating universities as exporters. The PLOS ONE data suggests inbound patients are highly profitable in exactly the same way.

The delivery margin in dental tourism accrues to Turkey. The component margin — the implant systems themselves — accrues largely to Switzerland, Germany and Sweden, whose firms designed them. When the technology moves on, as with the newer cement-free and screwless dental implants now displacing older abutment designs, the engineering IP is once again continental European. Turkey sells the operation. Basel sells the part.

Britain sells neither.

That raises questions for an economy that keeps announcing it wants to be a science superpower. In any exportable service, there is a design layer and a delivery layer, and the money is in one or both. Deciding you will compete in neither is also a decision.

Somewhere in your business is a capability that nobody outside your postcode can buy. Because you have never converted it into something with edges: a scope, a price, a timeline, a guarantee.

That conversion is product design. Britain is extremely good at being excellent. We are oddly reluctant to be buyable.

REHOVOT, ISRAEL — Amai Proteins, an Israel-based food technology startup that develops sweet proteins for the food, beverage and dietary supplement industries, has named Doug Brown as its new chief executive officer.

Brown succeeds Amir Guttman, PhD, who is transitioning to an executive board member role.

Brown joins the company from Sirio Pharma, where he was most recently vice president, head of global account management and earlier general manager of Americas.

He also was previously chief commercial officer at Best Formulations, a division of Sirio Pharma and earlier was CCO at Clasado Biosciences.

Guttman, who had been CEO since July 2025, joined Amai in 2018 as a board member.