The facts: since the early hours of this morning, Steam’s storefront and community features have been rendered inaccessible for many of its users – blocked behind a sea of grey and a server error code.
The speculation: two Twitters users claiming responsibility for the downtime have crippled Valve’s servers with a barrage of DDOS attacks.
The whys: hrrrrm. We’ll have to get back to you on that one.
DDOS attacks, as you’re likely depressingly aware if you’ve read PC games news for any amount of time, see outside parties overload online networks in order to keep them from their intended users. In recent months (and even recent days), they’ve been used to bring down government websites, game servers, and now, uh, PC games distributors.
At the time of writing, we’re managing to access the contents of Steam’s ‘Store’ and ‘Community’ tabs about half the time. During the other half, we’re met with a -118 error that informs us Valves servers “may be offline”.
It’s not just users who’re affected. According to Maia creator Simon Roth, the downtime has left Early Access developers unable to communicate with players via the forums or upload new builds to Valve’s servers.
Meanwhile, Steam Support’s Twitter feedhas remained schtum. Most of the noise is instead happening on two Twitter accounts. There, DDOSers claim they intended to attack the Steam store only, in response to a Derp Trolling group attack on EA’s Origin service – but also hit the community “by accident”.
The lowlights of their feeds are sad exclamations of racism and homophobia, interspersed with taunts to the wider Steam community they’ve claimed not to target. The worst elements of that community have responded in kind with rape threats.
The DDOSers’ motivations momentarily seem to reveal themselves when one expresses their hope to “wake up with 50k followers”.
So Steam got back up, but we just rip’d it again. http://t.co/MQvcrqlyjG #pwned courtesy of myself and @LARCENY_
— chF (@chFtheCat) January 3, 2014
blah blah blah steams down blah blah blah im mad blah blah blah
— chF (@chFtheCat) January 3, 2014
After this attack is over. We will give a 10 Minute period for people to buy games
— John Doe (@LARCENY_) January 3, 2014
wut do u guys want down next since we’re done with steam
— chF (@chFtheCat) January 3, 2014
As of about 20 minutes ago, the pair claim to have turned their attention towards us.battle.net, leaving Steam in relative peace. Let’s see how long they can withstand the wrathful glares of Blizzard’s stern upper management.
Have any of you lot struggled with Steam over the past eight hours or so?
Thanks, Kotaku.