Christmas Eve, December 24, turned into a frustrating day for gamers worldwide as the massive influx of players and shoppers during Steam’s Winter Sale brought the platform to its knees. During the outage, users were met with black screens and error messages, while DownDetector logged thousands of fault reports. SteamDB, the go-to unofficial status tracker for the platform, saw a staggering 250,000+ visits from users scrambling to check server conditions—with its data confirming that the Steam Store, Community, and Web API were all completely offline.
Good news for eager deal-hunters: you can now browse the Winter Sale catalog and make purchases using gift cards as normal. That said, it may take a little longer for the system to return to full stability. If you’re still facing access issues, the best course of action is to wait a few minutes and try again later.
The outage left countless users stranded—those launching the Steam client were greeted with nothing but a black screen, while web browser users hit brick walls of error prompts. Third-party analytics site SteamDB recorded an unprecedented surge in traffic, with over 250,000 users flocking to the platform in a short span to verify server statuses. As of press time, Valve has yet to release an official statement detailing the technical root cause of this widespread disruption.
The timing of the crash couldn’t have been worse, coinciding with the peak of Steam’s Winter Sale—a period when millions of gamers globally had planned to cash in their gift cards and cross items off their wishlists during the holiday break. The silver lining? The Winter Sale runs until January 5, 2026, leaving plenty of time for players to score those coveted discounts once things are fully back on track.
This isn’t the first time Steam has faced major server hiccups. The platform suffered a similar one-hour outage affecting the store and online services last October. Going further back to early September, the much-anticipated launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong caused temporary outages across Steam, the Xbox Store, and the Nintendo eShop, as legions of fans rushed to download the game simultaneously.
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