Valve’s video game store, Steam, is broken, and the servers evidently collapsed a few hours ago. It is extremely common for Steam to collapse at the start of a major sale, although these problems started about 18 hours after the start of the Lunar New Year Sale, so, huh, I wonder if that is really the cause. Whatever it is, hold your pennies because we are still waiting for a lasting solution.
Steam seems to have stumbled around midday GMT, with the Store not loading, giving error messages or at least taking too long. Every once in a while, it seems like he’s struggling to get up, but when I think it’s fixed, pow, it’s gone again. I am currently seeing 502 errors at the gateway.
I only saw problems with the Store, with friends and games and updates still working well, but evidently there were also login problems. Steam statistics show that he suddenly lost more than 2 million players around 13h40 GMT. Do they seem to be back now? For now, at least.
Anyway. All we can really do is wait for Valve to stabilize things. Until then, why not play Mystery Steam Reviews with Colm and Matthew? If you have a second enough view to guess all the games, you may be able to intuit when Steam will be fixed properly.