On most Tuesday evenings in the United States, if you listen carefully, you can hear a crowd of people groaning loudly at their computers. That’s because the popular PC gaming platform Steam typically goes offline for maintenance for a short period around this time.
And now is one of those times. Steam and most of its features are offline as Valve bangs on its servers with hammers and crowbars and other blunt objects. The downtime is primarily keeping people from accessing certain parts of the store, booting up Valve games (like Dota 2), and third-party games that rely on Steam services like Valve anti-cheat. This outage is normal, and it rarely lasts for a significant amount of time. But it still catches many of Steam’s 70 million users off guard, so consider this a public service announcement. You’re welcome.
We’ll try to keep this updated and let you know if Steam is offline for longer than usual and when it comes back.