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Steam experienced significant service disruptions Tuesday, leaving the platform's store and community features inaccessible to users worldwide while core gaming functions remained operational.
The outage affected multiple components of Valve's digital distribution platform, which currently has 12.7 million users online. While players could continue accessing games, with 2.99 million actively in-game, the Steam Store and Steam Community were both marked as "Service Unavailable." The Steam Web API was also offline during the incident.
The disruption comes as Steam's infrastructure showed signs of strain across its global network. In Europe, matchmaking servers in Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Stockholm, Vienna and Warsaw all reported full loads. The pattern repeated across the Americas, with servers in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Lima and Sao Paulo operating at capacity.
Connection issues extended beyond Steam's primary services. The Dota 2 API encountered internal server errors, though other game-specific services including Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 APIs continued functioning normally. Several Counter-Strike backend services, including sessions logon, player inventories and matchmaking scheduler, showed unknown status during the outage.
Steam's connection managers, which handle network traffic between users and servers, operated at just 59% capacity online, suggesting widespread connectivity problems. The service disruption also affected SteamDB.info, a third-party database tracking Steam's store and user statistics. The site reported its backend bot could not connect to Steam, and database updates faced a 20-minute delay. Despite the outage, SteamDB.info's page views reached 547,000.
Valve has not yet issued a statement regarding the cause of the service disruption or an estimated timeline for full restoration.
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