On December 24, around 1 PM ET, Steam users encountered significant disruptions, hindering their ability to access the game store and engage in online gaming. While Valve refrained from making a public statement regarding the outage, SteamDB’s unofficial status page indicated that the Steam Store, Steam Community, and Steam Web APIs were all offline during this period.
By approximately 1:15 PM ET, DownDetector had logged over 6,000 reports of outages, highlighting the widespread nature of the issue. Furthermore, Valve’s mobile applications were also rendered inaccessible, suggesting that the outage was extensive. The impact was particularly felt across popular online games such as Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counterstrike 2, which rely heavily on the affected APIs.
Recovery Progress
As the clock struck 4 PM ET, signs of recovery began to emerge, with Steam gradually regaining functionality. By 6 PM ET, the platform had largely returned to normal operations, with the primary PC, mobile, and Mac clients functioning effectively, albeit with occasional errors. However, certain aspects of the service remained sluggish, and according to SteamDB, many of Valve’s online games were still experiencing partial outages or were entirely down.
This incident marks the latest in a series of outages for Steam. The previous significant disruption occurred in October, when both the store and online services were unavailable for about an hour. Additionally, a surge in traffic during the launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong in September had temporarily overwhelmed Steam, the Xbox Store, and Nintendo’s eShop, resulting in similar accessibility issues.
Update, December 24, 6 PM ET: This report has been revised to reflect the current status of Valve’s offerings and their recovery timeline.
