Starting at 1 p.m. ET on December 24, Steam experienced an outage that impacted users’ ability to access the game store and play games online. Valve has not publicly acknowledged the outage, but SteamDB’s unofficial Steam status page reported that the Steam Store, Steam Community, and Steam Web APIs were all offline.
DownDetector received over 6,000 outage reports around 1:15 p.m. ET, and Steam was also inaccessible from Valve’s mobile apps. The outage appears to have affected Valve’s online gaming APIs, as Team Fortress 2, Dota 2 And counterattack 2, Also.
By around 4 p.m. ET, Steam itself had started to bounce back, and as of 6 p.m. ET the platform had largely recovered, with the main PC, mobile, and Mac clients generally fully functional, but occasional errors were occurring. Parts of the service are still extremely slow, and according to SteamDB, many of Valve’s online games are down or only partially working. When checking in at 4 a.m. on December 25, all services appear to have been restored. The Steam Web API, Store and Community are working normally and all games are working as usual.
Steam’s last major outage was in October, when the store and online services were unavailable for an hour. Earlier in September, the launch of Hollow Knight: Song of Silk temporarily shut down Steam, the Xbox Store, and Nintendo eShop due to the number of people trying to download the game at the same time.
Updated, December 25, 2026 at 4:23 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to reflect that Steam services have been restored.
Update, December 24 at 6 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to note which Valve offerings are currently functional and when they were picked up.
