Steam outage: Gaming service back after hours of downtime; players affected globally

Steam faced a major outage on Christmas Day (December 25). According to outage-tracking site DownDetector, the gaming service experienced disruptions for hours before it was fixed, affecting thousands of players worldwide. The issues peaked at midnight, with nearly 14,000 US users and almost 400 Indian users reporting problems with Steam. Despite the user complaints starting to decline at around 2 am, a spike in US users reporting issues was seen at around 4.30 am, which ultimately went down around 8 am. At the time of writing, over 2,700 users in the US are still reporting issues with Steam. Meanwhile, in India, there have been fewer than 10 reports at the time of writing.Steam’s unofficial status page also doesn’t show any downtime with the site. However, the US page reads the message: “There have been an increased amount of page views on this site in the past hour; this could indicate an issue with Steam.”According to Downdetector data, global players faced issues with server connections, logins, purchases, and more during Steam’s downtime. In the US, 78% of users reported problems with server connections, 15% couldn’t make purchases, and 7% couldn't log in to Steam during the outage. Users from across the country reported problems during the downtime; however, most reports came from the East Coast, including major cities such as New York and Washington.Meanwhile, in India, 88% of users experienced server connection issues, 9% had login problems, and 3% were unable to connect to their friends during the Steam outage. Reports of the blackout came from across the country, including Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, and other major cities.During the outage, some users noted that this downtime did not appear to be routine maintenance, PC Gamer reports. The report claims that at that time, Steam seemed completely down, as the unofficial Steam Status website reported websocket errors and indicated that the entire Steam store, community, and web API were offline. SteamStat page views were also rising, which showed that something had gone wrong, the report added.Some games on Steam remain playable during the outage, the report notes. Some users reported spending hours playing titles like Bloodlines 2 and The Last of Us 2 without issues. However, attempting to access any community-related features via Steam discussions, community groups, Steam charts, or links to external websites or social media accounts resulted in errors. Valve game matchmaking services were also offline during the downtime, the report adds.