Epic Fail: The full extent of Steam's maintenance mess

Posted on 5 Mar 2010 at 11:23

As we reported last night, a scheduled update booted its users offline at 10pm (GMT).

The steam and games statistics (pictured) shows the full scale of the problems, with the number of concurrent Steam users plummeting from a high of around 2.35m to a low of zero.

Gamers were, quite rightly, outraged by the outage, especially as the warning forum post said that "game play should not be affected", and that no time frame was given for the maintenance. Just before midnight (GMT) the service returned to normal, leaving many people unable to play their favourite multiplayer games for almost two hours.

In February a similar situation occurred. Many gamers think that the service isn't good enough, particularly as many games require Steam for multiplayer action. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sparked outrage when it was released, as Activision took the decision to remove dedicated server support and forced people to use Steam for all online play.

Author: David Ludlow

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