Steam knocked out by a blustery day
Posted by inpheaux on December 15th, 2006 at 10:24 pm
Long before Steam was released, and continuing up through today, one of the key arguments against the otherwise wonderful electronic delivery system for games was very clear and very simple: What happens if Steam disappears? If for some reason Steam isn't there anymore, you'd lose access to all the games you've paid for. Until now, this was just a theoretical scenario, but today it's very real.
Last night, due to some unbelievable weather, large portions of Seattle lost power. Due to the severity of this weather and the fact that it just plain wouldn't stop, repair crews had to wait until today to even start thinking about fixing it. The primary authentication servers for Steam are, unfortunately, located in one of the affected areas, and have been down for nearly 24 hrs.
What does this mean? Well, since you can't authenticate your account, you can't play games. Furthermore, since you can't authenticate your account, you can't change your account settings to be in offline mode, which would at least let you play single-player games. To further confuse things, since the authentication servers are totally offline, if you go through the "recover password" feature Steam will casually tell you that whoops, your account doesn't exist.
So what are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to survive without your daily CS fix? I suggest taking a nap, because there's nothing you can do. Just don't jump to suicide, thinking your precious Steam account with hundreds of dollars worth of games attached to it is gone forever. It'll be back as soon as Seattle gets its grid back in order. Furthermore, this event will probably result in Valve creating authentication server backups in several facilities nationwide, so there will be failsafes in place if this happens again.
Oh, and when should we expect to see it back? Who knows. It'll be up as soon as possible, since crews are working more or less around the clock right now to get Seattle powered again. Once it's back up, it'll be announced over on their news page.
Source: Steampowered Forums (if you can connect to them)
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