Steam Goes Dark on Christmas Eve, Gradually Recovers After Hours-Long Outage

The disruption began around 1 PM ET, when users started reporting problems loading the Steam Store, launching games, and connecting to online services.

Steam suffered a widespread outage on December 24 that left millions of players unable to access the store, community features, or online gameplay for much of the afternoon in the US, disrupting one of the platform’s busiest holiday periods.

The disruption began around 1 PM ET, when users started reporting problems loading the Steam Store, launching games, and connecting to online services. Valve did not publicly acknowledge the outage, but SteamDB’s unofficial Steam Status page showed the Steam Store, Steam Community, and Steam Web APIs as offline during the early stages of the incident.

Reports quickly piled up elsewhere. DownDetector logged more than 6,000 outage complaints by roughly 1:15 PM ET, with users citing login failures, missing libraries, and broken online matchmaking. Steam was also inaccessible through Valve’s mobile apps, cutting off account access for users on phones and tablets.

The outage extended beyond the storefront. APIs supporting Valve’s online games were also affected, causing connectivity issues in titles such as Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike 2. For many players, games would launch but fail to connect to servers, while others were unable to start games at all.

Signs of recovery began to appear by around 4 PM ET. The Steam Store and client started loading for some users, though errors and slow response times persisted. By approximately 6 PM ET, Steam had largely rebounded. The main PC, Mac, and mobile clients were broadly functional again, allowing users to browse the store, access libraries, and launch games. That said, performance remained uneven, with occasional error messages and long load times.

According to SteamDB, several components were still struggling after the main recovery window. Parts of the Steam Community remained sluggish, and many of Valve’s online games were listed as down or only partially operational, indicating that backend services were still stabilizing.

The Christmas Eve outage follows a pattern of recent service disruptions for Valve. Steam’s last major outage occurred in October, when the store and online services were unavailable for about an hour. Earlier in September, the highly anticipated launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong briefly overwhelmed Steam, the Xbox Store, and Nintendo’s eShop as massive download traffic hit all three platforms at once.

As of the evening of December 24, most core Steam services were back online, but some multiplayer and community features continued to recover well into the night.