Many gamers around the world spent time with their families yesterday, opening presents, catching up and generally having a good time. But in the world of Steam, Valve’s wildly popular content distribution service something was amok.
As people logged into their Steam accounts, eager to spend their newly acquired Christmas cash on some sweet computer games many were faced with a curious sight: The details that they were usually presented with were replaced with Russian or some other foreign language. Upon further investigation, many players noticed that what they were viewing were the details of someone else’s Steam account complete with personal information such as email accounts and purchase history.
After a short while, Valve became aware of the issue and took the Steam store down in order to correct the problem. In total, it was down for approximately one and a half hours. In that time, they were apparently able to resolve the issue, and since the Steam store has returned, everything appears to be functioning properly again.
In the time it was down, however, the dedicated fans over at the SteamDB had already begun to theorize about the cause of this catastrophe. Later that day Valve released an official statement (which corroborated what SteamDB was saying):
“Steam is back up and running without any known issues. As a result of a configuration change earlier today, a caching issue allowed some users to randomly see pages generated for other users for a period of less than an hour. This issue has since been resolved. We believe no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information and no additional action is required by users.”
Was this your first time hearing about this? Or were you right in the thick of this debacle? Did you have a happy holiday season? Are you looking forward to the New Year? Tell us all about it in the comments.
