Steam's annual Summer Sale is gamers' equivalent of Christmas, offering thousands of popular games at greatly discounted prices. This year's sale offers popular titles like Shadow of Mordor and Mafia III at steep discounts, but it seems the Grinch is intent on spoiling Christmas.
A hacker group called CyberTeam has taken responsibility for some users' inability to purchase games during the sale, claiming these to be part of an initial test, before a full-on assault on all servers, possibly via a DDoS attack. Their tweet says the following:
We are attacking "STEAM" in the test, the attacks that are occurring are not official, very soon we will attack all the servers.#steamdown
— CyberTeam (@_CyberTeam_) June 22, 2017
Twitter is already ablaze with numerous posts from people complaining about the outages under the #steamdown hashtag. Outages have also been confirmed by website analytics service DownDetector:
Steam is having issues since 1:21 PM EDT. https://t.co/pVyPZ2dizA RT if it's down for you as well #Steamdown
— DownDetector (@downdetector) June 22, 2017
Some comments on DownDetector's page seem to indicate the errors caused by the server problems are also causing inconsistencies with payments, asking users to pay again for a game they've already purchased.
It's unclear as to how credible CyberTeam's claims are, as the problems could simply be a result of server overload due to increased traffic because of the sale. If they are true, however, it's unknown what the hacker collective has planned for the future and what their 'official' attack will entail. Fortunately, the sale is expected to last for two weeks until July 5, so gamers unable to grab their latest as a result of this should be able to do so when Valve hopefully gets a handle on the situation.
Source: CyberTeam (Twitter) | Image: Steam
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