Steam and Other Major Gaming Networks Hit by Possible DDoS Attack

Yesterday there was an outage on the popular gaming platform Steam for a good hour. Suddenly millions of gamers could no longer log in or purchase games. There may be a DDoS attack behind the outage, which probably also affected other services.

Unable to use Steam for a good hour

An hour-long outage of Valve’s gaming platform Steam began last night at around 7:15 p.m. Both the store and the Steam Community and the service’s web API were temporarily unusable. This resulted in countless users receiving an error. Even when the UI loaded on the web and apps, no content was displayed.

The extent of the outage was apparently enormous, as status pages received enormous numbers of hits within a very short period of time. According to various media outlets, the interfaces for Valve’s first-party games such as Counter-Strike 2 and Deadlock were also affected by the failure. Downdetector also received an extremely large number of error reports relating to Steam within a very short period of time.

In addition to Steam, many other web services were also affected

In addition to Steam, some other game-related online services were apparently either unavailable or difficult to access. Riot Games and its servers behind popular titles such as League of Legends and Valorant also had to contend with some outages, according to user reports on Downdetector (known here as “AlleStörungen”).

There are also indications that various other web services also had problems due to a widespread attack, including Sony’s PlayStation Network, Epic Games and thus also Fortnite, Microsoft’s Xbox services, Electronic Arts and its online services, and the US streaming platform Hulu. According to security experts, this suggests that it was a broad denial of service attack.

The Canadian service provider TCPShield, which specializes in defending against attacks on Minecraft servers, reported that at 8:15 p.m. GMT, attackers triggered a so-called TCP Carpet Bomb attack in which they attempted to imitate data traffic on a gigantic scale. A botnet called “Aisuru” is suspected to be behind the attack, through which such attacks are repeatedly launched with the help of countless hacked Internet of Things devices.