Steam’s online store faced an outage during the launch of its annual Summer Sale, causing widespread access issues for millions of users.
The outage began early on the U.S. West Coast, with reports spiking around 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time. While other Steam services remained mostly functional, the store itself was listed as offline on unofficial status pages.
The Steam Summer Sale, running through July 10, offers steep discounts on many games, attracting heavy traffic to the platform. For example, the Crash Bandicoot trilogy is currently discounted by nearly 90%, priced at $3.99.
During the outage, users reported difficulties loading the shopping cart and wishlists on both the browser and mobile app versions, preventing purchases or even viewing saved items. Attempts to add games like Gris to the cart resulted in errors and loading failures.
Social media and forums showed gamers expressing frustration and sharing similar error messages. This type of server overload during major sales is not unusual for Steam; a brief outage occurred during last winter’s sale as well. However, this summer’s disruption lasted several hours, with downtime extending longer than usual.
Outage tracking site Down Detector recorded over 5,000 reports at peak, with issues persisting for around two hours. Gradually, Steam’s services recovered, with the store and wishlist functionalities becoming accessible again by early evening. Correspondingly, reports on Down Detector sharply declined as users regained access.
Valve appears to have resolved the overload after managing the increased traffic from millions of gamers drawn by the sale. By the end of the incident, users were able to shop and explore discounts without issue.