What Happened to Gamers on Steam and Valve on Christmas Eve?
Steam suffered a major outage on Christmas Eve, leaving gamers unable to log in, browse the store, or play online, though services were fully restored by the next morning.
Gamers trying to log on to Steam on December 24 ran into trouble starting around 1 PM ET. The popular digital storefront and its online services, including the Steam Store, Steam Community, and Web APIs, experienced a major outage that disrupted both purchasing and gameplay. Valve has yet to publicly comment on the outage, but SteamDB’s unofficial status page confirmed that multiple parts of the platform were offline.
At its peak, DownDetector received over 6,000 reports of problems, and users couldn’t access Steam through PC, mobile, or Mac. The outage also affected online services for Valve’s games, including Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike 2. Players were left unable to browse the store, check their friends list, or even log into some online games.
Emmanuel Umahi
By around 4 PM ET, the platform began to recover, and by 6 PM ET, most Steam clients were broadly functional, though occasional errors and sluggish performance persisted. Some online games were still partially down. By the early morning of December 25, all services, including the Web API, Store, Community, and online games, had been fully restored.
Steam isn’t new to outages. In October, the store and online services went down for an hour, and earlier in September, the launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong caused temporary crashes across Steam, the Xbox Store, and Nintendo’s eShop as millions of users tried to download the game simultaneously.
The takeaway
For gamers, the timing of this outage right on Christmas Eve was frustrating, cutting into peak holiday gaming hours and potentially delaying Winter Sale purchases. The incident also highlights how reliant players are on Steam not just for buying games, but for connecting online and enjoying multiplayer experiences. While services have been restored, this outage is a reminder that even the largest digital game platforms are vulnerable to technical disruptions.
Emmanuel Umahi
