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Steam Is Down In The Midst Of Holiday Sale
Reports have been circulating throughout the morning, and we’ve confirmed through our own attempts to log in: Valve’s Steam service is currently down, which means those holiday gaming purchases are going to have to wait. In our case, we tested on three separate gaming PCs. On one, we were able to start Steam and play games in offline mode, but we weren't able to get online. On a second gaming PC, we weren’t even able to get the application to open to play games offline; other reports on the internet this morning are reflecting a similar mixed experience regarding attempts to log in.
On a third gaming PC that was already logged in, Steam appeared to still be working. As such, if you are already logged in, we'd strongly recommend staying logged in.
We’ve reached out to Valve regarding the outage, and will report back if we hear anything. However, like many gaming outages of years past around the holidays, one of the biggest challenges is that many normal contacts are unavailable, so it’s entirely possible we won’t have an update anytime soon.
Steam was undoubtedly inundated with traffic in recent hours, which may have been the cause of the outage. Regardless, Steam’s downtime means that players on holiday break will need to wait to take advantage of some of the deals going on as part of the holiday sale, including excellent prices on Stardew Valley, Cities: Skylines, and Doom.
Our Take
It’s frustrating for players when a major gaming service stops working, but I’m confident there’s at least one group that’s even more frustrated – the engineers who are likely even now trying to get the service back into working order.
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