Steam Down Right Now: Steam down: is Steam down right now? 18,000+ outage reports as Cloudflare failure knocks out servers globally
Reports began climbing steeply before noon. By 11:08 a.m. PST, Downdetector had already logged more than 11,000 complaints. That number surged past 15,000 within the hour, then crossed 18,000 by the afternoon peak — one of the largest single-day complaint spikes Steam has seen in recent months. A separate monitoring service, IsDown, recorded 1,551 user reports in a 24-hour window as of 8:17 p.m. UTC. One tracking page saw a spike of 431,000 views in a single hour, reflecting just how fast users scrambled for answers.
The breakdown hit players on a Friday evening — prime gaming hours — compounding frustration for a user base that numbers well above 50 million in the United States alone.
What Is Causing the Steam Server Outage Today
The failure traces back not to Valve’s own infrastructure, but to Cloudflare — the content delivery network and distributed DNS provider that Steam relies on for routing, traffic management, and protection against cyberattacks. Cloudflare confirmed connectivity problems across its network on February 20, pointing to elevated error rates in its Workers AI service, bot management systems, and a significant spike in errors on its core 1.1.1.1 platform.
Latency surged at Cloudflare’s Newark data center in particular, creating bottlenecks that rippled outward. Because Cloudflare sits between users and Steam’s servers globally, a disruption at that level effectively degrades the entire platform’s ability to route connections — regardless of whether Valve’s own hardware is functioning.
This is not a hypothetical risk. Cloudflare powers a significant portion of the modern internet. When it stutters, platforms that depend on it — including Steam — go down together.
Not everything on Steam failed equally. The disruption is partial, not a total blackout. Logging into a Steam account remained possible for many users throughout the outage. However, online matchmaking took a direct hit. Server connection problems account for the majority of user complaints — roughly 43% of all filed reports, according to outage data. Login difficulties represent about 26% of notifications, while cloud sync failures, friend list errors, and achievement tracking make up much of the rest. Users from the United States and the Netherlands reported being repeatedly kicked from games mid-session. Others found the store and game library simply not loading. Steam’s own cloud save system — which backs up game progress — also failed for a portion of affected players, a problem that goes beyond mere inconvenience for those mid-campaign in a long-form title.
Single-player games already downloaded to a local machine largely continued working. The damage was concentrated in anything requiring a live server handshake: multiplayer, matchmaking, syncing, and store browsing.
Steam Outage Map: Where Players Are Hit Hardest
The disruption is global, but unevenly distributed. Internationally, Cloudflare’s own status data showed fragmented server performance across regions. In Asia, Hong Kong servers were classified as “Overloaded,” while Singapore and Dubai showed high load status. In Europe, Frankfurt and Helsinki connection managers returned unavailable status flags, while Amsterdam and London remained operational. In the Americas, connectivity held up better by comparison, though the US still generated the bulk of user outage reports.
In the United States, the East Coast reported some partial stabilization by late afternoon, with successful logins trickling back. The West Coast continued experiencing delays into the evening hours. Monitoring tools, based on historical resolution patterns, projected full recovery within approximately two hours of the peak — though that timeline remained subject to change.
Steam Outage History: This Is Not the First Time in February 2026
This is Steam’s second notable outage in February alone. On February 12, a separate disruption lasted 3 hours and 45 minutes before being resolved, according to IsDown’s incident history. That incident involved intermittent accessibility issues but did not reach the scale of Friday’s event. In January 2026, a brief failure concentrated on the West Coast resolved within a few hours.
Steam’s historical outage data shows a median resolution time of around 46 minutes across 26 incidents tracked in the past 90 days. The February 20 event, coinciding with the tail end of a seasonal sale period — a traditionally high-traffic window — pushed server load beyond what infrastructure could absorb cleanly. Technology analysts point to traffic overload from simultaneous game update downloads as a likely contributing factor alongside the Cloudflare disruption.
Valve Has Not Issued an Official Statement
As of Friday evening, Valve had not released a public explanation or acknowledgment of the outage. The company has not identified a root cause nor provided an estimated time to full resolution. Users on Reddit and across social media platforms were left monitoring third-party trackers like Downdetector, SteamDB, and IsDown for updates, given the absence of any official communication.
This silence follows a familiar pattern. Valve rarely issues proactive statements during service disruptions and typically allows infrastructure to recover without public commentary.
What to Do If Steam Is Down for You Right Now
If you cannot connect to Steam servers, the fastest workaround is to switch to Offline Mode, which allows access to locally installed single-player games without a live server connection. For users still experiencing issues after partial recovery, clearing the Steam download cache — found under Steam Settings > Downloads > Clear Download Cache — has resolved connection problems for some. Restarting the client and verifying your internet connection with a wired cable rather than Wi-Fi can also help.
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