Steam servers went offline for a few hours, but they're back up now
Down, but not out.
Crikey, glad that's over. It looked like we'd lost Steam for a couple of hours. Today's outage not only affected store listings, community pages, friends lists and workshop access, but also took several of Valve's lovely multiplayer gunshoots/wizard bashers/hat-acquirers offline. Countless poor Steam users were forced to do other things with their time - playing their Steam games alone, going elsewhere for their online kicks, or perhaps even stepping away from their computers entirely to make a nice cuppa.
While it was possible to log into the Steam client itself during the downtime, Store and Community features were completely inaccessible. Launching, updating and installing games worked as expected, but buying 'em, or playing with friends? Not so much. Valve games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 also took a hit, with multiplayer servers going offline.
According to Steam Stats, the platform started wobbling at around 3 pm UK time, before going completely offline by 4. A little after 6 pm, the site reported that Steam had made a full recovery. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive servers in Poland and wider Europe remained a little shaky, but have calmed in the time it took to write this paragraph. Magic.
Predictably, if unfortunately, Valve have remained silent on the issue. Their Steam Twitter channel makes no mention of the downtime, instead flaunting midweek madness deals. I was surprised to learn while writing that their Steam Support account has been radio silent since 2017, last posting an announcement for reporting bugs in those controllers wot they don't make any more.
Oh well. You may resume consuming videogames as normal. It'd just be nice if you kept us in the loop, eh, Steam?