If you normally play your Valve games through the servers for the eastern United States, you might have a worse time than usual today. Valve’s US East matchmaking servers are currently down, and it’s not because of capacity issues or a DDoS attack or anything you’d usually expect – no, they’re down because somebody cut a cable.
“The US East matchmaking server cluster is offline temporarily,” Valve tweets from the official Dota 2 account. “There is a cut fiber cable causing a wide area outage in the hosting region. In the meantime we suggest queuing in other servers.” There’s not yet an estimated time for the fix, but then I guess Valve can’t tell you what the cable company’s gonna do.
The issue also affects Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but as venerable Valve observer wickedplayer494 notes on Twitter, those games should automatically distribute you to appropriate servers. But you can expect worse latency if you’re used to performance on the US East cluster.
If the mildly-degraded server performance is too much for you, might we recommend some other free Steam games while you wait?