Steam, the popular online gaming service for PC gamers around the world, was offline for several hours on Christmas Day. The outage followed threats from a hacking collective known as 'SkidNP' that they would take down Steam and Minecraft servers over Christmas.
When attempting to open the Steam client, users were presented with a message detailing that there is an issue connecting to the Steam network:
image provided by streamReports of the outage began to surface earlier this morning (14:50 GMT / 6:50 PST) and continued to grow in number as more people attempted to connect.
On Reddit there have been numerous complaints of the outage. Community member komentra said:
I really hope it isn't those script kiddies DDOSing Steam. PSN, and XBL again.
At the time of writing, there has been no comment from Valve regarding the outage. While SkidNP has claimed that they would attack Steam on Christmas Day, it is also just as likely that due to it being the festive season, there's a higher than expected number of people signing in and downloading content. As Reddit user Super_Cyan pointed out:
To be honest, it'd be rough figuring out what's an attack and what's just heavy traffic on a day like today.
The client would occasionally display 'connecting to Steam account' for awhile before throwing users back out. Our attempts to connect to Steam earlier today were unsuccessful, but the service is now back online.
source:neowin
