1 Attachment(s)
Steam is Down and No One Knows Why
Steam is down and no one knows why. Chaos has erupted on the internet as the popular gaming service suddenly dropped connection, leaving gamers wondering what happened. The internet has been responding to the news as one might predict they would, with players wondering what happened to Steam - and there is precious little information about what caused the servers to go down.
When services like Steam drop, those who depend on them are often left scratching their heads. Facebook, for instance, doesn't go down a lot - but when it does, #Facebookdown trends on Twitter almost instantly. Steam, as one of the most popular methods for buying and games, is an important service for many gamers - and outages generally result in a short period of panic.
Players trying to access the store are met with a blank page. The help page returns only a Steam logo. The issues began at around 8:30 a.m. EST, according to community-run Twitter account SteamStatus. The store went down then came back online. After a short period, the service began to encounter issues again. The Twitter account reported that 42% of Steam services had gone down. Soon after, the entire store - then the Community - dropped. Since then, the account has posted updates reconfirming that Steam is still down, with ongoing major issues at Steam beginning at 11 a.m. EST.
Currently, the website returns a logo and the message, "The site is currently unavailable. Please try again later." Strangely, Steam's official Twitter account has remained silent through all this. Nor has its owner, Valve, said anything on the issue. The good news for players is that many if not most games downloaded through Steam should work, as the outage does not seem to affect the Library. So this inconvenience will not impact them in the same manner as an Xbox Live or PS Plus outage.
It's unclear what caused the outage to occur, but players - for now - will not be able to purchase or look for new games. This is unfortunate, but at least players can still access the games they already own. It's surprising that Valve has not yet said anything about what is causing the outage, but players can likely assume that they have not done that because they are busy working on the issue.
