Steam Outage Hits Store and Valve Multiplayer APIs

• Key Takeaways:

• A partial Steam outage began around 1PM ET on Dec. 24, affecting the Steam Store, Community and Web APIs.
• SteamDB and Downdetector reported thousands of user reports; Valve did not publicly acknowledge the disruption.
• Online features for Valve titles (Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike 2) were impacted; platform recovery began by late afternoon but some services remained slow.

What happened

Starting at roughly 1PM ET on December 24, users reported that Steam’s storefront, community features and web APIs were unreachable.

Third-party monitors, including the unofficial SteamDB status page and Downdetector, logged a spike in outage reports — Downdetector recorded over 6,000 reports around 1:15PM ET. Valve did not post an immediate public acknowledgement.

Which services and games were affected

Reports show the outage hit multiple Steam components: the Steam Store, Steam Community and the Steam Web APIs. Valve’s mobile apps were also reportedly inaccessible during the incident.

Because some matchmaking and authentication functions rely on those APIs, multiplayer games tied to Valve’s back end—such as Dota 2, Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike 2—were partially or fully offline for many players, according to SteamDB.

Timeline and recovery

The incident began around 1PM ET and showed signs of recovery by about 4PM ET. By 6PM ET the main PC, mobile and Mac clients were broadly functional, though users still reported occasional errors and sluggish behavior.

SteamDB noted that while the core clients had mostly recovered, some parts of Valve’s infrastructure and several online game services remained degraded or only partially functional into the evening.

Context: recent Steam outages

This upset follows earlier interruptions: Steam experienced a short outage in October and a high-demand launch in September (Hollow Knight: Silksong) temporarily overloaded multiple digital stores. Those incidents illustrate how a centralized distribution and multiplayer backend can be affected by either internal failures or unusually heavy traffic.

What players should do

Check live-status pages such as SteamDB and Downdetector for ongoing reports before troubleshooting locally. If you can’t authenticate or matchmake, try launching games in offline mode or playing single-player content until services fully stabilize.

Why it matters

Steam is central to millions of PC gamers and to the operation of Valve’s multiplayer titles. Service disruptions impact purchases, downloads and online play, underscoring the importance of robust API and infrastructure monitoring for platforms of this scale.