January 30, 2020 Steam is back online after a bout of unexpected downtime.
If you’ve had trouble logging into Steam today, you’re not alone – but it looks like the trouble is over. As of 10:16 PST / 13:16 EST / 18:16 GMT, it appears Steam services are back online, a little over two hours after everything came crashing down today. The outage affected services worldwide, including both the web store and the desktop client, and we still don’t know exactly what caused the problem.
The unofficial Steam Status tracker began reporting issues on Steam connection manager servers at 8:11 PST / 11:11 EST / 16:11 GMT on January 30. Those issues expanded to full-on downtime across most Steam services a few minutes later, and have taken effect worldwide. We had login problems in both our UK and US offices, and players in other regions reported issues as well.
In the midst of the downtime, access to the Steam client itself (and our game libraries) is back online, but the store, friends lists, and community site remained offline for the duration. That follows a bit of unexpected Steam store downtime earlier this morning, several hours past Steam’s usual weekly maintenance session.
We’ve reached out to Valve for comment, but haven’t yet gotten a response. I imagine they’ve been having a busy morning regardless.
10:16 PST ✅ #Steam Store appears to be back online. https://t.co/m0NlDb8Z4P
— Unofficial 💩 Steam Status (@SteamStatus) January 30, 2020
This article previously concluded with a joke about Epic winning the great store wars, but now that humour is old and irrelevant. Instead, here’s a big ol’ list of free Steam games for you to peruse and enjoy.