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Steam Hit By 'No Connection' Error Worldwide
jones_supa writes "Steam users worldwide are getting more than they expected this Christmas, courtesy of Valve. Increasingly annoyed reports are piling up on a Steam Community thread about an ominous 'No Connection' error. Depending on your luck, this means you can either start the client in offline mode and play only single-player games with anything related to the Steamworks cloud features disabled, or you cannot start Steam at all and consequently access anything in your library. However, store related functionality seems unaffected, in case this blunder made you feel like purchasing some more games you may or may not be able to play these holidays." Update: 12/25 17:45 GMT by T : The connection problems were fixed; did you hit the loading errors before they were resolved?
"We were hit with a large amount of completely unexpected network activity during the morning of the 25th of December. In association with the local police we are currently investigating a hacker called Mr S. Claus and will post an update shortly."
Seems working for me.
no problems here.
Now, it's time to celebrate being alive, in rl. Put your hands in the air, and step away from your gaming console. Nice and Easy.
I guess someone closed the wrong Valve? ;-)
Steam was showing no connection for 30 minutes earlier and has now fixed itself. Storm in a teacup?
From the blurb: "Depending on your luck, this means you can either start the client in offline mode and play only single-player games"
How does this stop people from being able to play multiplayer games that run on one PC in offline mode?
the issue seems not to be affecting SoCal.... np connecting at all here.
Connected fine from Italy and the UK over the past few days, and haven't lost an connection on Steam... well, ever. Connected at this moment, in fact.
Either this is a localised problem or - as usual - some sheer capacity issue for the half-hour that everyone in the US logs on and then not again.
Steam has a HUGE amount of players online (5m at my last check a few minutes ago) on hundreds of servers worldwide, and I'd think we'd notice 5m people just dropping offline, or all the servers not working, and people complaining about THAT in the forums. Fact is, it's a blip, if anything. And probably a local blip at that.
What exactly is ominous about a "no connection" error? Is it followed by a second message - "the killer is in your house" or some such thing?
#DeleteChrome
Impatient solution: buy games until you find one which actually works. That would be the point in shutting down gaming and not the store, right?
... for supporting DRM.
Indeed. Sell me the game at a decent price and skip the DRM.
It's working fine for me right now under Kubuntu.
You can usually find more information about down time at:
https://twitter.com/Steam_Support
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=784745&page=37
There is also this user thread regarding down time: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=784747&page=869
Finally, you can see statistics about the number of users on Steam here: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
As the graph shows, Steam didn't go down for everyone. When it does, the graph plumets to 0 user and it's pretty obvious that there is something wrong.
Bashing on Steam is getting old. Steam is down from time to time, it happens, and they are usually always quick to restore service. There is no story here.
Steam has a very consistent schedule of getting updates on Tuesday, many of which take the network down. I would not be surprised if this was the case. I've learned to avoid any games that require a Steam connection on Tuesdays. (Usually ones that are tracking achievements that affect the game or using steam cloud I would guess.)
A continuous attempting to connect that never happened. I assumed it was the wireless at the family's house, disabled wifi adapter and steam started right up in offline mode. no connection = no attempt to connect.
Cheap games and a company that gets their servers back up in less than half an hour on Christmas day? Oh the agony.
There's always GOG.com...
No one who cares about being able to run programs that they pay for would use this DRM system anyway. And anyone who believes that Steam never could or would cut them off from their purchases deserves this little foreshadowing of what will come of their DRMed purchases.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
If anything, this article is some nice free advertising for Steam. As another poster mentioned, every now and then Steam servers are restarted for an update, and the speed at which outages are resolved set the bar for the industry.
GoG.com 's been having a great sale, and is all DRM free, in case anyone's missed it so far...
Sorry... you guys MAY call me 'troll' (those I have knocked on their asses in technical debates in computing, since it's the "best they have" vs. facts I use), but - I am FAR from a troll!
* I merely tell it how it REALLY is, with documented concrete, verifiable, & undeniable respected sources in the field of computing backing my words up...
(Problem is - many of the "Pro-*NIX" crew here just cannot handle facts, &/or reality...)
Likewise on the greetings though per the holidays. It's already "gone up in smoke", heck with flames...
APK
P.S.=> Anyhow - I was forced underground with you via the downmod, but that was coming and justifiably (unlike downmods that get applied to some of my posts here that the "penguins" noted above, just CANNOT handle)...
... apk
When Steam first came out I was not too keen on the idea. I was active duty in the Navy at the time, and one of the few personal entertainment choices aboard a ship underway is laptop computer gaming. As personal computers may not be connected to Navy networks (and bandwidth is needed for more important stuff), always on game requirements are a non-starter. As it turned out it was mostly not a problem. If you planned ahead, you could get Steam running in off-line mode and it would be good as long as required. However, there were times when Steam inexplicably demanded connection. At that point, you are screwed.
That being said, not that I am retired and have a reliable connection, I mostly don't worry about it. But every now and then my ISP will flake out (and I think this is pretty common with residential service). The irritation factor of not being able to play during those time can not be underestimated.
Were they running on Amazon AWS? Has been issues with US regions in the last 24 hours as well.
I was trying to watch streaming content on Christmas Eve on Netflix and Hulu (via Apple TV) and was likewise getting 'unavailable' errors; with Netflix, it would happen at different points (from trying to bring up the Netflix main screen down to trying to start an individual episode of a TV series). I chalked it up to tens of thousands of new Netflix/Hulu customers all trying out their new TVs/home theaters/streaming boxes last night. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Netflix was down due to amazon cloud problems that Netflix uses. Interestingly amazon prime that competes with Netflix still worked.
If it was that then it would be netflix being idiots and not meeting obvious capacity expectations. But it seemed to be an amazon issue - which also brings netflix's management into question since surely amazon's prime streaming video stuff is a competitor for them? Relying on a competitor for critical infrastructure sounds like a good way to have things screw up at critical times (not that I think there was anything malicious yesterday).
Sure, but when you want a specific title choice can be limited.
Connecting fine, but I am currently unable to purchase anything. Any card I attempt to put through sits there for a couple minutes "waiting" then informs me that my bank rejected my card. Two banks both rejecting my card at the same time when ample funds are present? Don't think so.
Oh no! If Steam isn't working, then neckbeards might have to go out and interact face-to-face with the rest of the world!
Oh, the horror!
So I was affected by this whilst trying to playing a game with my friend using COOP, it was very frustruating that our scheduled play was interrupted. Over 1 million people were affected by the outage which is now resolved.
Dude... I am the real APK, and I didn't MAKE that post or the post before it. But I am a REAL troll!
* The way the world WORKS, is that the powerful screw over the less powerful. I say we fuck over the powerful and make no one HAVE power.
(Unix sux, Linux sux, Windoze sux, and so does your Mom!)
To heck with my karma.
APK
P.S.=> Anyhow fuck you all, I'm going to go pay a nice lady to let me place my penis inside her. Merry fucking sessions greetings... ... apk
You mean something man made doesnt work 100% of the time and never ever fails? I cant believe it!
All sarcasm aside who gives a shit? Nothing ever works all the time and no matter when something breaks, its always the worst time for the user of it. Its called life and life never goes the way you want it to all the time. Funny how some people act like a company is personally coming to their house, killing their children, raping their cat, castrating them, executing their grandmother, robbing them, pissing in their face while raping them with a giant steele studded dildo freshly pulled red hot from a fire just because a website or some service is having problems for awhile.
And you know what? Fuck steam. Go to gog.com and see their sale. They have tons of great games you cant find anywhere else and dont have a bit of DRM in them meaning when you buy it, you actually own it completely and it belongs to you.
You're a troll, & you're losing it... quit *trying* to "impersonate" me, & grow up.
* Can you do that much on Christmas @ least?
APK
P.S.=> Will wonders NEVER cease...
... apk
I probably never got it because Steam never gets turned off.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Netflix management should take the blame for yesterdays outage and the moronic way they communicated (or should I say did not communicate) the problem to their clients. From what I see all they could muster was one misleading twitter update saying that 'some devices' are being affected (it was a massive outage) and than another one blaming it on amazon. Not a word on their portal page, which was encouraging people to sign up for service. I am curious what would their new clients think when after dishing out their credit card numbers all the saw was 'not connected to the internet' error. While amazon is technically at fault this is the second time this year Netflix goes down due to problems in the amazon North Virginia data center. You would think a company responsible for 1/3 of the internet traffic would have build some infrastructure of their own or at least bothered with a backup plan.
I have spent the last 4 weeks at work in a remote location with limited internet access. I set Steam to Offline Mode before I left. About a week in, when when I clicked on "Start in offline mode" as it asks at every startup, it said it couldn't connect, and that was the end of that. Three weeks with none of my games on Steam playable. Makes me wonder why I bother buying anything.
Going to be back in town (hotel) for a night before heading out again, hopefully I can get it back into "offline mode" for January. *sigh* Would suck if it is still out, and I can't get into offline mode before I go away again.
For all those who saw this error occur, were you Steamed?
I was trying to set up steam on a new machine. I downloaded it and ran it and it said it couldn't connect to the steam servers. It was extremely odd. What's weirder is that I got 2 emails to my inbox with validation codes and I never got to that step in the login process. It worked a couple minutes later though.
Steam worked 100% fine on my desktop, but I got the "no connection" error on my laptop using my son's account. Same network. Absolutely bizarre.
Explain to me why a game like Civilization needs to have that crap bundled in the first place? Even with a 24/7 service, it still sucks.
A "you don't actually own anything" model is pretty new to gamers so they're kinda paranoid about Steam. Something like this is a Netflix-level event that will scare away millions. Hopefully it scares away game developers too, who are making steam-only distributions like Skyrim.
Civ 5 can be played DRM free.... if you don't want to buy it on Steam then don't. Dur.
If it wasn't Steamworks, it would be SecureROM, Origin, Games for Windows Live or some other DRM scheme. Steamworks DRM isn't as good as DRM free, but it sucks less than virtually every other DRM scheme out there.
The reason Civilization V comes with DRM is that the publisher refuses to distribute the game without it. If you want a better answer than that, ask 2K Games. They'll give you the usual BS about piracy, I'm sure, but it still comes down to the same answer; they demand that it include DRM.
Steam does distribute some DRM free games which you can launch from a shortcut without ever opening the client. They have no requirement that games include their or any other company's DRM. The only reason the DRM goes in is because the publisher insists that it go in.
"Where were you when the Christmas Steam Outage hit?"
forgotten to open a valve somewhere...
If it wasn't Steamworks, it would be SecureROM, Origin, Games for Windows Live or some other DRM scheme. Steamworks DRM isn't as good as DRM free, but it sucks less than virtually every other DRM scheme out there.
So it may be a punch in the gut, but at least it isn't a knee in the crotch? What a sales pitch!
Context is everything. Pulling that one line out misses the point that I was making. The publisher requires the DRM, not Steam. Bitching about Steam is stupid when it's the publisher who is at fault.
Because Steam often pops out of Offline mode (at least, when I was using it regularly, it did)
Some other Slashdot users appear to be under the impression that even if Steam might have been problematic for the first year after the release of Half-Life 2, it has become more reliable since then. When were you using it regularly?
a game is most likely to break the graphics driver.
That's likely to change once browsers implement WebGL.
But but but but...
Or you could choose neither by not purchasing their game, but that means not play Civ 5. It's not like they're forcing you to play their game. But if you choose to buy, DRM is part of the package. As the GP said, take it up with 2K Games.
Steam isn't using Amazon AWS by any chance are they?
Please name one game I can buy on steam and install without installing the steam client on my computer.
Then a pirate version is fine. Zero loss since we could not come to an agreement.
+1