Steam outage not a result of security breach

Two days ago, Valve head Gabe Newell issued an update on the security breach that affected the Steam platform and its forums last year, revealing that the hackers were successful in securing a copy of Steam transactions made between 2004 and 2008, including user names, email addresses, encrypted billing addresses, and encrypted credit card information.

Steam users were put on their guard again this morning, with the platform suffering an inexplicable outage resulting in both the website and the client going down. However, Valve has since set the record straight.

In a series of Tweets and forum posts, the publisher reassured Steam users that the outage was due to a power failure from what is supposed to be Valve's "uninterruptible" power source.

"Our datacentre's uninterruptible power supplies experienced a power failure," Valve posted on the Steam forums. "The power is back on now, and we're working to get service restored as quickly as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused."

An uninterruptible power supply provides emergency power when the input power source--in this case the main power supply--fails.

Valve later updated its post, telling users that Steam is up and running at a "normal user load" but that a few lingering issues are still being ironed out.