Update: Not for the first time, Steam is back online. Steam was down at various points this afternoon, but its latest recovery is holding for now.
Original story:
Steam is down. It's not just you. A spike in Steam outage reports emerged this afternoon at around noon EDT, and while Valve's store briefly returned at approximately 12:55pm EDT, it is down once again for many users as of 1:15pm EDT.
It's not uncommon for Steam to chug a bit on Tuesdays under Valve's regularly scheduled maintenance, but today's Steam outage has seemingly gone far beyond that.
There's been no official word from Valve regarding the cause of the downtime or its expected recovery. Other PC gaming giants like Riot Games have reportedly been dinged in recent DDOS attacks that some claim may have affected Steam, but those reports are currently thin and likewise unconfirmed.
Steam is, however, most certainly down. If you try to pull up the web version of the Steam store, you'll likely run into this error message on an otherwise blank white screen: "An error occurred while processing your request." This error message is accompanied by miscellaneous reference numbers and Edgesuite URLs, which aren't particularly helpful for PC gamers just hoping to game.
The client version of the Steam store is also blank. I was able to sign into Steam during a brief window of uptime, though opening a game store page proved to be a slow task, but now the Steam store won't load at all. Countless other users, including some of my GamesRadar+ coworkers, have reported the same issues.
Downdetector and the dedicated Steamstat.us watchdog both show an array of errors and user-reported issues. "There have been 1,728,000 page views on this site in the past hour, this could indicate an issue with Steam," the latter confirms. An issue, indeed.
