Update at 5:05 p.m. PDT: Steam is coming back online for most people
The largest PC digital-distribution channel on the Internet is struggling to keep up with demand.
Steam is down, according to dozens of complaints on Twitter and the Steamstat.us website. Unlike other recent outages, which only affected the Steam Community, all Steam portals are down at the moment.
and steam is down, why gaben why
— Tanner (@Tanner69046YT) June 11, 2015
An outage during a Steam sale is nothing new. Valve tempts fate on a regular basis by running hundreds of discounts at a time that drop games that may typically cost $30 to $50 down to $2 to $10. This encourages thousands — if not millions — of people to slam the site at once looking for the best deals.
Valve even runs special deals to keep customers engaged and checking the Steam store throughout the day. For this sale, players can participate in a Monster Minigame where everyone needs to work together (by buying certain games) to defeat certain bosses. Doing so will unlock even more deals — and may even bring more people to the store.
Of course, this outage is not exclusively affecting people who just like to buy games and not play them. Anyone looking to get online with releases like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or Dota 2 — which require Steam servers — are also out of luck.