Steam Is Down (Again), It's Not Just You
If you're a regular Steam user, you may have noticed that this gaming network has been down a bit more often than usual as of late. Having seen issue just this past week and here now again not a week later, it would seem that a recurring issue must be at fault. And it's not a scheduled maintenance point, if that's what you're thinking.
At the moment it would appear that Steam is down, as the announcement title from IsSteamDown.com suggests, not just relegated to the United States this time around. Users in the UK have also reported downtime as well, and we”re seeing reports of issues from throughout the United States as of around 3PM Central Time. Checking in on Steam Services Status you'll find at least the Steam Community to be hitting "Very Slow" status while most other entry points appear to be "Normal."
Valve generally schedules maintenance once a week, occurring on Tuesdays at around 4PM Pacific Time. That's 6PM Central time – and generally, it's right around the time everyone is eating dinner in the United States while Europe sleeps.
Of course even if maintenance were occurring within some Valve entity or another today, it'd only last between 10 and 30 minutes. Vavle's current count (when this article is posted) is closer to 298,667 users while their peak while their peak earlier today was over 6 million. That's a real downtime there, without a doubt.
As you'll be able to access Steam Stats right this minute, it would appear that Valve isn't all down – in all likelihood, they'll have brought all services up to speed within a few minutes. Don't panic!
Have a peek at our recent Steam-related news while you're waiting for services to return and full, and don't forget – there's always offline mode. There is until the gaming cloud arrives, that is.
UPDATE: March 18th, 2014 – Steam is down again. According to SteamStat, the Steam Store and CS:GO are down – CS:GO is launching, while the Steam Store has no definite return time.UPDATE: March 21, 2014 – Steam is not "down" at the moment, but wait times for multiplayer games is high. According to SteamStat, you're looking at "Matchmaking Average Wait Time 82 seconds" as we update this article at 9:00 PM CST.