Steam and Valve are having a massive outage that is preventing anyone from accessing the digital store and playing games. This hits right when many people are hoping to squeeze in some holiday gaming on Christmas Eve.
Valve hasn’t acknowledged the issue yet, but SteamDB’s unofficial status page confirms that the Steam Store, the Community features, and the primary Web APIs are all offline. The problems started just after 1:00 PM ET; by 1:15 PM ET, reports on DownDetector had spiked to more than 6,000. If you are trying to access Steam through the mobile apps, you are likely having trouble there, too, as the platform is inaccessible across the board.
This isn’t just about shopping either; the outage appears to be affecting the APIs for major online games like Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike 2. Some users claim that the service briefly came back, but it seems to be going back and forth with no true fix.
The timing of this outage is particularly rough since it’s the day before Christmas. You would think Valve would want its services running smoothly for the holiday break. This isn’t the first time Steam has struggled lately. Back in October, the store and services were down for about an hour. Even more dramatically, in September, the massive traffic from the Hollow Knight: Silksong launch managed to crash not just Steam, but the Nintendo eShop and Xbox Store simultaneously.
With gaming services unstable, you might have some unexpected free time on your hands. If you are anything like me, you are probably still scrambling to finish your holiday shopping. Since the holidays are just about here, shipping deadlines are tight, but you still have a few options for tech gifts that could ship quickly.
The Samsung Odyssey G9 OLED is going for $778 on Samsung’s website, but the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 for $1,500 may be more your speed if you really want to get one of the best monitors available. Since we don’t know how long this outage could last, you may not be able to play anyway, so waiting for a monitor won’t be so bad.
There is some speculation as to what it is, but a Reddit post pointed out that people who work at Steam have to miss out on the holidays because the software needs to be fixed. Employees or management likely had to interrupt their holiday break to come in and fix the issues. So, try to be kind if you send messages on Twitter to get the company’s attention.
While we wait for Valve to fix its server issues, it’s probably best to assume you won’t be logging into your games anytime soon. If you need to shop for games for friends on PC, you may have better luck shopping for gift cards from Amazon, Walmart, and GameStop. That way, you can be sure they get a gift on time, even if the store isn’t fixed by then.
Source: Downdetector, Steam Status
