Among my circle of friends, many have a tradition of playing multiplayer games after the kiddos are asleep and the presents are prepared. It makes me wonder whether this has increasingly become a common tradition, and as a consequence the hug this year is more than even Steam could bear. This is pure speculation, of course.

Since I'm indulging in luxurious speculation: maybe Valve has taken Steam down to prepare to announce Half Life 3 tomorrow.

Fun to be on call December 24th.

Ha, just noticed when I was trying to login to the desktop app. Kept timing out. Hope they get it sorted out before everyone is trying to redeem gift cards for Xmas.

Maybe that is why is down.

On sales the store does not go down, but gets really slow.

Yeah the login is taking ages and it's needing me to re-auth too

Just the homepage is down, I think.

You can still browse categories, e.g. RPGs: https://store.steampowered.com/category/rpg

And individual game pages are also fine: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1903340

It’s Christmas n00b eve. All video game platforms are getting crushed.

Good hunting.

Next year, keep in mind that you can buy games as gifts and then schedule them to be delivered to the recipient account at some point in the future. So you know, buy ahead of time, like normal gifting…

But they still get crushed in the download like everyone else

Someone tripped on the Christmas lights

Yeah but I couldn't find an empty socket so just unplugged a few other things. It works now.

The Christmas lights I mean.

Up to 29 strands or 1 server rack supported and if a bulb goes out the rest stay lit, but if you lose a drive in the RAID the whole thing folds.

Yikes. Notable that it rarely happens though!

Does mean that debugging and getting it back up might take more time as they aren’t necessarily “battle tested” for this situation.

Their regular maintenance window is Tuesdays, and there are often issues then.

Ohh, adult life shielded me from those outages. Guess I don’t get a lot of weekday gaming time.

valve has continually had problems with their services. this is because theyre both reliant on other services they dont control, and low quality engineering management. the second leads to the first.

And more people turning up at the clinic doesn’t mean there are more sick people, but it’s an indication.

Funny that you ignored “indicates,” which is a perfectly valid inference here, and also it’s true.

If you want to be pedant, don’t self-own.

People visit these sites when they have problems. A large number of people experiencing problems correlates heavily with an issue with the service.

I don't think "indicates" and "not necessarily" are in conflict here.