Valve suffered a short-term interruption of Steam service
Steam is experiencing outages. Since Sunday, between 1 and 2 pm, the amount of logged-in users has shown a sharp decline, followed by wild fluctuations. It is not clear at this time whether it is a technical problem or a DDoS attack.
The disruption is clearly visible on the Steam stats page. Reports on gaming forum Neogaf give the impression that the problem is global; users on different continents are complaining about it. The Steam Community website and other related services are also affected.
Valve’s popular digital distribution platform hardly has to deal with outages. The last time it happened was during the Christmas season of 2015, when the company suffered a ddos attack. PoodleCorp, a hacker group that recently hacked into some well-known YouTubers, reportedly claimed responsibility on Twitter. They alleged that they acted on behalf of the operators of CS:GO gambling sites. However, the group has since deleted his tweet and they may not be behind it.
PoodleCorp demanded also took responsibility for the downtime of the Pokémon Go servers on Saturday. That the group is behind this is, however, not certain at the moment and, moreover, almost impossible to verify; the game currently has many millions of players worldwide, which can easily cause server problems. On Saturday, the game became available simultaneously in 26 European countries.
Update, 15:37: judging by the stats page, the problems seem to have been solved by now. At the moment more than ten million users are online again.