Slashdot Mirror
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.
Steam was showing no connection for 30 minutes earlier and has now fixed itself. Storm in a teacup?
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
... 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.)
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...
Things irl are just a collective figment of everybody's imaginations. We're all just dreaming that stuff. /. is real. And it's very boring. That's why we think up this thing called "real life."
I have been a captive in America my entire life. Everybody and everything uses customary units instead of metric.
what nonsense, even open source based "cloud" services have had their occassional failures. it's just a glitch, and gamers shouldn't care about the issues you raised, they're just games and not mission critical or human progress critical applications. Valve is a business, they will do what it takes to keep the revenue coming in.
GoG.com 's been having a great sale, and is all DRM free, in case anyone's missed it so far...
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).
That is a pretty bold statement right there. I care about being to run my programs and I use STEAM. I realize there are tradeoff's for convenience. In the amount of time I have used STEAM the inconvenience that I have received from this service has been marginal at the most.
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.
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.
I don't know about you but I don't like to pay for stuff that magically evaporates.
30 minute outage for certain areas isn't "evaporated". That's better track record than say gmail or amazon (planet wide outages) or linux kernel (weeks down) or opensolaris (poof gone, & indiana not production stable)
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.
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.
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.
How does this stop people from being able to play multiplayer games that run on one PC in offline mode?
Because Steam often pops out of Offline mode (at least, when I was using it regularly, it did) and you would find yourself in online mode when relaunching steam, especially after a crash. And of course, in a modern PC (or IME since Windows 3.x) the graphics driver is most likely to cause a crash, and a game is most likely to break the graphics driver.
Maybe this problem has been fixed, but it was happening to me quite a bit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Valve is a business, they will do what it takes to keep the revenue coming in.
Right up until they fail, which could happen tomorrow or in 20 years.
They promised to release patches to free Steam games when they go under, but that's a bullshit promise, because if they do that before a buyout they don't get bought out and they go under and no one ever hires them again, if they do it during a buyout it may be illegal, and if they do it after a buyout it's also illegal (not their stuff to sell.) If they do it on the way to bankruptcy or during bankruptcy it's certainly illegal (Same grounds.) You're not getting those patches, ever. You don't own those games, period. And they are more than likely to become so much digital noise in the future.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Steam isn't using Amazon AWS by any chance are they?
hmm, 16 year old company worth $2.5 billioni and growing. you say they will collapse, why?