It’s not just you experiencing the problem – Steam is currently down, with both its website and store pages inaccessible.
Update (December 24, 2025, 3:36 PM EST): Good news! The Steam store and website are back up and running. In total, the downtime lasted just a bit over an hour. You can now return to redeeming those gift cards and snagging some fantastic deals during the Winter Sale.
However, it's worth noting that we might not be completely in the clear just yet. If you're still encountering issues, it might be best to wait a little while longer before trying again.
Original Story:
If you're at home hoping to browse the Steam Winter Sale but are met with nothing but a black screen on the app or an error message on the website, don’t panic—this isn’t due to your home WiFi connection. Steam is experiencing outages, and there’s no clear indication of when services will resume.
As of this writing, Valve has not issued any statements regarding the cause of the outage, which has persisted for over an hour. Thousands of users have reported problems on DownDetector, a site that tracks service disruptions (you can check it out here), and according to SteamDB, over 250,000 people have visited that page to stay updated on the situation.
This outage comes at a particularly inconvenient time, as countless gamers around the globe are eager to redeem their gift cards and capitalize on the discounts available in the Winter Sale. Fortunately, the sale will run until January 5, 2026, so there’s still time for Valve to resolve the technical difficulties.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to do, consider visiting the Epic Games Store, where you can grab today’s free game, The Callisto Protocol (link to game).
After that, you can simply hold tight and wait for Steam to come back online. As noted by Adrian Chmielarz in a recent interview, the Epic Games Store may not feel like home to many PC gamers. He explained, "People are not, basically, using EGS as their home; it’s not home to them. I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not, but EGS doesn’t have written reviews. They don’t have the forums. There’s nothing to do there but to buy. So that will always lose to a shop that is also emotional and you can engage with. EGS is a shop, and Steam is a community."
We will keep this article updated with any new information from Valve regarding the reasons behind the downtime and the expected duration of the outage, or if the store starts functioning again unexpectedly.
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