Steam is down. And the gaming community is rightly freaking out. Valve’s gaming platform Steam, announced its arrival of the Winter sales yesterday, only a day after it seems the servers couldn’t bear the load and the platform had died for over an hour now.
The reason of this server failure isn’t yet clear. Although, speculations can be made that Steam servers weren’t prepared for such massive transactions, resulting in the downfall of the services. Or, alternatively, Phantom, a self-proclaimed ‘hacker’ group last year initiated the DDoS attacks during Christmas and took the responsibility later on Twitter.
We’ve requested a response from Valve on why the services have been terminated worldwide.
However, it is not just the game servers, Steam’s entire network has been affected by this complication. The services affected are:
- Steam Store
- Web Services
- Client
- Friends list, and
- Game servers
This is not the first time there has been a significant drawback of the services; hackers threatened to take down entire PSN and Xbox network. Steam also faced a major glitch in their systems last Christmas, where the impact was so huge that they had to publicly respond to authenticate their acknowledgment of the attack or rather the glitch.
Multiple tweets claiming responsibility for the act
http://twitter.com/PhantomNations/status/812339904357289986
http://twitter.com/PhantomNations/status/812350839977295873
Twitter handle “PhantomNations has claimed the responsibility for the attack but it’s still not sure whether they are just leveraging on this downtime or it has been indeed their deed. And yes, #SteamOffline may soon be the trending hashtag on Twitter. The story is still developing. It will be too quick to announce whether it is Phantom Squad’s DDoS attack on Steam servers or the downtime is due to the rising traffic on account of Winter Sales. Sadly for Steam gamers, though, the attacks on the Steam servers seems to be gradually inflating with time. It doesn’t look we will be having a good Christmas. Also, it is Saturday tomorrow. Enjoy your weekend! *wink wink*
UPDATE: 12/24/2016, 00:20 (IST) – The servers came back to life. Steam services which earlier encountered issues were fixed. PhantomNations account was suspended from Twitter.
