In the evening, users from Russia began reporting failures in Steam's operation. However, this problem is not local – players from other countries also encountered technical issues, meaning a massive outage occurred.
Players reported being unable to log into their Steam accounts; in some cases, the store and content of the "Community Hub" for various games would not load. For example, the section with screenshots or illustrations might be completely empty, as if nothing had been uploaded to it.
Some users took the incident with humor. For instance, TheSquirrelElite joked that it was an intern on their first day at Valve who decided to optimize the code to make the servers work better.
On the Steam Status service, which monitors the operation of Valve's service (store, community, API) and various company games, a sharp drop in the number of users was recorded at the time of the outage. In several regions, Steam community servers are still "down," but in many, operations have already been restored.
The reasons for the Valve service outage are currently unknown. It is noteworthy that a new sale started today.