Steam has been down all Christmas Eve — here’s the issue

If you’ve been having issues on Steam today, you’re not alone. Valve’s storefront has spent the majority of Christmas eve down, giving people errors of all sorts.

Parts of of Steam are experiencing “websocket errors” according to SteamDB. Steam’s community features and Web API are offline altogether. Popular status website Down Detector also notes a higher volume of user reports, noting problems with server connections, purchases and logins. What this means in practice is that you may not be able to load specific aspects of the storefront, like profiles. You may have trouble purchasing games or using community features. Personally, even aspects of Steam that do work seem to have trouble loading even if they do eventually work.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t play games, but given that Steam is both a social hub and store, the timing couldn’t be worse. Valve has not acknowledged the outage or shared when users can expect things to go back to normal.

Sorry, anyone who wanted to participate in the Steam Winter Sale. Perhaps you didn’t need more games you weren’t going to play, though.