Steam, which connects players to a storefront of thousands upon thousands of games, and also connects players through those games in online play, is having some trouble right now. With the Lunar New Year sale only just in its rear view mirror, it seems the new year is not starting off with a bang for Steam, as it recently went down in its entirety.
Many players realized this when attempting to log into their own Steam clients, which is one of the most important applications on many a computer. For anyone looking to find out what happened, here is everything that is currently known, although information is still coming in and the picture is not yet complete.
During the outage, the main Steam website and many of the features on the application and client were completely unavailable. The website returned either error messages or a general message of unavailability, and attempting to access the client returned something similar. The store and friend chat were unavailable, and even a player's profile page, which includes their inventory, badges, and other information, could not be accessed. Anyone who was trying to download the free-to-play promotion for the Half-Life series was no doubt regretting not getting all four games onto their computer already.
As of the writing of this article, information is still pouring in on exactly what happened and why, but the website does appear to be back online. There are still issues with lag for some players, as Steam appears to be running slowly, and features are coming back piecemeal as the service returns. Online play may also be riddled with lag in some games, including PUBG and the Disintegration beta.
Something interesting to note is that games that were already installed on computers were still functioning during the shutdown. The online components of these games is another matter, though, and players may find that features like like apps for Tabletop Simulator continue to be shaky.
As of this article, it is unclear why a shutdown of such scale and length occurred, as there were very few warning signs and, so far, no outreach from Valve. Whatever the cause of the hiccup, it is a good idea to keep an eye on Steam's performance in the coming hours and days to see if it may have affected prominent Steam games like Dota 2 and its falling player base in a permanent way.