There were a lot of unhappy PC gamers around the world on Sunday. Earlier that day, the PC game download service Steam hit a snag, resulting in the service shutting down for a couple of hours. The down time looks like it started after Steam reached a new record of concurrent users on the service.
Users took to Twitter to ask if everyone else is having the same issues (they were) and complaining about the shut down of Steam. Steam"s owners Valve posted a note on the Steam Twitter page that it was "investigating reported outages." The official Valve web site was also down today.
As it turned out, it wasn"t a server issue but a power failure that was the cause of the Steam issues. In a post on Steam"s message boards, the support team wrote said, "Our data center"s uninterruptible power supplies experienced a power failure. The power is back on now and we"re working to get service restored as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused." By 4 pm Eastern time, services on Steam were starting to be restored.
In early January, Steam went over the 5 million concurrent user mark for the first time. Valve says that Steam now has over 40 million active users.