Error code 1 is Valorant's general connection error, shown when the game cannot reach Riot's servers. Riot's own guidance is to restart the game and the Riot Client, and in practice a short outage, a stale client session, or a local network hiccup is behind it.
If error 1 appears every time you launch while other games connect fine, flush the DNS with `ipconfig /flushdns` in a Command Prompt, and check that the firewall allows Valorant and the Riot Client through. If it still fails, reinstall the Riot Client, since a corrupted client install can fail the connection check on every launch.
Is Valorant error code 1 a ban? No. It is a connection error, not an account action. It says the game could not reach the servers, nothing about the account itself.
Why does error 1 appear after an update? Updates restart Riot's services and change the client version, and a client that starts before the update finishes, or that still has the old version cached, can fail to connect until it is fully updated and restarted.
Does error 1 mean my internet is down? Not necessarily. Your connection can be fine for everything else while Valorant still fails, for example when Riot's servers are down or the client session is stale. Checking the server status separates the two cases.