Steam’s online store faced a prolonged outage during its 2025 Summer Sale, affecting thousands of users attempting to access their carts and wishlists.
The disruption began on the West Coast of the U.S. around 9:50 a.m. Pacific Time, with reports escalating to over 4,400 by mid-morning and peaking near 5,000 shortly thereafter, according to outage tracking site Down Detector.
Users reported issues including carts failing to load, wishlists being inaccessible, and error messages preventing purchases both on browser and mobile app versions. One attempt to add the game Gris to a cart resulted in a system error citing a problem reading store item properties.
The outage coincided with the Summer Sale, which launched with significant discounts, for instance, the Crash Bandicoot trilogy at nearly 90% off. The high volume of concurrent users—Steam’s charts indicated over 32 million online—likely overwhelmed servers.
Similar incidents have occurred during major sales, with a Winter Sale outage in December 2024 lasting under an hour. This summer’s outage, however, extended beyond two hours before services began to recover.
Social media and the Steam subreddit saw users expressing frustration and poking fun at Valve’s handling of the surge. By 7:00 p.m. UTC, access to carts and wishlists had started to stabilize.