Why Is Steam Down? Winter Sale Followed By Crash Of Website

Digital gaming distribution platform Steam went offline Friday. The apparent crash came one day after commencing its winter sale. Social media users expressed their frustration with the holiday service interruption.

The platform's crash was likely the result of a huge boost in traffic related to its bargains. However, a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack could not be ruled out, video gaming website Gamespot reported. Steam announced Thursday its Winter Sale offering as much as 67 percent off of the site's reported 781 million games.

The outage was initially reported around Friday morning and appeared to be worldwide, according to PC Gamer, which contacted users in Germany. The websites of Steam's support team and parent company Valve Corporation also appeared to be down. Two user accounts @cripthepoodle and @PhantomNations apparently claimed responsibility for the attack. The latter account has since been suspended.

The news came two days after social media blogging site Tumblr reported a service interruption that lasted about three hours. Tumblr was previously affected by three massive DDoS attacks on Oct. 21 that struck Dyn and Amazon, which manage large portions of the internet's domain name servers.

Steam was launched in 2003 by the Valve Corporation and claims around 25 million concurrent users from more than 135 million accounts around the world. The service reported its best year in 2015, with sales totaling $3.5 billion, or 15 percent of all PC gaming sales.

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