On December 24, on the eve of Christmas, the popular gaming platform Steam experienced a massive outage that left thousands of users worldwide without access to the game store and online services. The problems began around 1:00 PM Eastern Time and lasted over five hours.
Scale of the Problem
The monitoring service DownDetector recorded over 6,000 complaints from users at approximately 1:15 PM. The outages affected not only the main Steam platform but also mobile apps for iOS and Android.
According to the unofficial Steam Status service from SteamDB, the following stopped working:
- Steam Store
- Steam Community
- Steam Web API
- Online games from Valve, including Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike 2
What Worked During the Outage
Despite serious problems with online services, users could still launch offline games. Many gamers reported that they were able to continue playing already downloaded games, but access to community features, discussions, and matchmaking remained blocked.
Gradual Recovery
Around 4:00 PM Eastern Time, Steam began gradually restoring service. By 6:00 PM, the main clients for PC, Mac, and mobile devices had mostly returned to normal functioning, although individual errors still occurred.
As of 9:00 PM, some services were still operating unstably. The Web API and some community functions remained unavailable, and Valve's online games were functioning only partially.
Competitors' Reaction
Competing platform GOG didn't miss the opportunity to remind users about the advantages of their DRM-free games, which work independently of server status.
Valve company has not officially commented on the causes of the outage. This is already the second serious Steam outage in recent months — the previous one lasted an hour in October 2024.
