Valve: DDoS cyberattack caused the Steam caching catastrophe (cachetastrophe?)

On Christmas, the Steam digital gaming store and community broke and caused all kinds of strange errors. Now, Valve is coming out to explain more of what happened.

The PC-gaming giant took to its blog today to help us all better understand what happened. It turns out that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyberattack caused a caching error which in turn caused people to see private information for other Steam members. The company explained that it is working to find out whose information was exposed, and it will alert people about what they should do next. This is a blemish for Steam, which is the No. 1 seller of PC games. Valve is likely worried about maintaining its reputation — and it may keep its standing with gamers with transparent explanations like this one.