Gamers hoping to use some of their Christmas money to pick up a new game or two in this year’s Steam Winter Sale were disappointed earlier today, after Valve’s online game storefront collapsed.
The Bellevue-based game company offered a free copy of its zombie survival title “Left 4 Dead 2” to people who were able to install the game by 10 a.m. today, which promptly drove a horde of gamers to its marketplace. That, in turn, seems to have completely fried the company’s servers.
The service is back for some users, but other potential buyers are being greeted with an error that says: “Unable to connect to server. Server may be offline or you may not be connected to the Internet.”
Valve’s official Steam support Twitter account hasn’t been updated with any details on the outage.
We’ve reached out to Valve for comment, and will update this post when we hear back.
UPDATE: While the storefront appears to be up, it appears that it’s not possible to purchase any games. It’s still possible to play games that are already in a user’s library, though.
UPDATE 2: Steam appears to be back up for everyone.
