Twas the day before Christmas and all through the house, Steam is back online after a brief and unexpected outage

Update: As of 2:15 pm ET, it looks like Steam is back. I've had a couple moments of up and down, and some very sluggish store page load times for a few minutes, but it seems solid now. Steam Status is also reporting that systems (and users) are back online. Good news that it wasn't an extended outage, but we'll keep mashing the "refresh" button now and then just to be sure, and will update again if Steam takes another unexpected powder. That's not good.(Image credit: Unofficial Steam Status) Original story: It's the day before Christmas and all through the house, nobody is using Steam, not even a mouse-because, you guessed it, Steam is down. It's unclear what's going on, but at a little before 2 pm ET on a Wednesday, we're guessing this not routine maintenance. Steam appears to be completely gone: The unofficial Steam Status website is reporting websocket errors, and says the entire Steam store, community, and web API are offline. SteamStat page views are also jumping up, which is a pretty reliable indicator that something's gone wrong. That's not good. (Image credit: Unofficial Steam Status) We've reached out to Valve to see if they've got anything to say about it, and will keep an eye on things in the meantime. Naturally, we will also update when Steam is back. The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill. You must confirm your public display name before commenting Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.

Preview: ~391 words