Video game distribution service Steam was down for hundreds of thousands of users globally on Christmas Eve, and with the outage stretching for over an hour, the issue could be serious.
Reports of the service being down started coming in at around 2 pm ET, before being restored around 2.30 pm. The restoration, however, was brief.
Steam remains down around 4:15 PM EST
As of 4:16 PM EST, the services remained inaccessible. According to the outage tracker Downdetector, over 10,000 users have reported service disruptions at this time. Out of which, 80% reported service connection failure, 13% faced purchases issues, and 7% could not login.
Is Steam working again?
As of writing this, services had not been restored, as per the unofficial Steam Status website that tracks outages.
As per the website, Steam is experiencing "web socket errors", which are affecting the entire Steam store, community, and web API, all of which read: “Service Unavailable”.
The Counter-Strike, Deadlock, and Team Fortress 2 APIs also showed “Service Unavailable”, while the DOTA 2 API status read “Offline”.
Pageviews on Steam Status had also spiked to 397,000 at the time of updating this, indicating a large scale outage.
When Mint attempted to access Steam, it showed an error.
Valve, which runs Steam, has yet to issue an official update: nothing has thus far been posted on either Valve or Steam's social media handles.
As the outage continued, users on Reddit joked that it was Valve's way of telling gamers to spend time with their friends and families.
Steam's last major outage was a couple of months ago, in October this year, when the store and online services were unavailable for an hour.
A month before that, the eagerly-anticipated launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong temporarily took down Steam, the Xbox Store and Nintendo's eShop due to a massive spike in the number of concurrent download requests.
(Please check back for updates.)
