Steam Down: Major Christmas Eve Outage Disrupts Gaming Platform

Steam Suffers Major Outage During Holiday Period

Starting at around 1PM ET on December 24, Steam experienced an outage that impacted users ability to access the game store and play games online. The timing couldn’t have been worse for PC gamers, as Valve is currently running its big annual Winter Sale, leaving many unable to purchase last-minute Christmas gifts or access their game libraries.

Widespread Impact and User Reports

Nearly 62,000 users have now reported a problem with Steam, Downdetector shows. The outage affected multiple aspects of the platform, with SteamDB’s unofficial Steam Status page reported that the Steam Store, Steam Community, and Steam Web APIs were all offline. The outage appears to be affecting APIs for Valve’s online games, like Team Fortress 2, Dota 2 and Counterstrike 2, as well.

Recovery and Ongoing Issues

By around 4PM ET, Steam itself had begun to rebound, and as of 6PM ET, the platform had largely recovered, with the main PC, mobile and Mac clients broadly fully functional, but ocassionally erroring out. However, there are still parts of the service that are extremely sluggish and, according to SteamDB, many of Valve’s online games are down or only partially functional.

Significance for PC Gaming Community

This incident highlights the vulnerability of digital gaming platforms during peak usage periods. The dedicated Steam Status website reports that the outages are occurring around the world. For millions of PC gamers relying on Steam as their primary gaming platform, such outages serve as a reminder of the importance of robust server infrastructure, particularly during the holiday season when gaming activity surges and users attempt to capitalise on seasonal sales.