The Steam store went down earlier today. Game downloads and library functionality seem stable, but, smack in the middle of the big Steam Next Fest demo blowout, the store itself was unavailable in both the client and web versions of Steam.
Instead, you'd run into error "E502 L2 - We were unable to service your request. Please try again later," with a sad little blob expressing discontent. Tag yourself: I'm the purple blob blinking in bewilderment.
Fortunately, we at GamesRadar+ were still able to download games, make updates, and launch games, including online games. (Slay the Spire 2 and Arc Raiders both worked without issue for me.) This outage would, however, block you from finding and therefore downloading new Steam demos.
Valve hasn't given any sort of reason for this brief Steam outage. Down Detector affirmed widespread issues.
It's possible that Valve's PC gaming emporium joined the countless other websites and online shops in an emergency response to newly discovered web vulnerabilities.
In an October 21 security advisory, CERT-EU, "one of the most mature cyberdefence entities in Europe and a central cybersecurity cog of the EU," warned of "Critical Vulnerabilities in PHP" that could enable remote code execution. Per Reuters, many government websites were also urgently taken offline.
"CERT-EU strongly recommends identifying PHP-based applications and preparing to patch as soon as fixed versions become available," the organization wrote. "Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organisations should consider isolating internet-facing applications from public networks until a fix can be applied."
Sites and tools across the web have buckled in direct or indirect response to this PHP wave, so I wouldn't be surprised if Valve had some spot-cleaning to do as well. Fortunately, the store seems to have been restored in short order. Now we can all get back to sifting through 8,000 AI-infested game demos.
