Steam works again. You can at least connect and download games, the store and marketplace are still down.

It's back up now. For me anyway. :/

I don't know if all cloud-saving games do it, but usually there's also a local copy available in your Steam client folder.
That way you can play offline and sync it to the cloud later on.

I had posted that a while back.

Allow me a temporary evil laugh >:D

It's loading up for me now. I guess the party's over.

Oops, missed it

So 'it' wasn't dead after all. The topic subject suggested it really was dead - as in 'nuked from orbit'
2016 is the year of the reaper after all.

:p

Aww, such a shame. =P Not that I really approve that kind of shit.

I don't get why these bot-kiddies - let's face it, DDoS attacks have little to nothing to do with actual hacking - feel to ruin other people's fun simply for the LOLs. Some people just like to be dicks I guess.

Works. By pressing that reload button, you can bypass errors and white screens.

Being attention whoring dicks I guess? Nothing that Steam could squad away apparently.

Good thing I already got my Team Fortress 2 fix earlier today before the blackout.

I was also contacted by a relative, why can't he play his Geometry Dash. I instructed him how to log in in offline mode, and he was able to play the game.

What's odd (funny?) is that things like this is not enough to make people think twice about using Steam, ... or at least only using Steam. If you are going to use gaming platforms I think it's a good idea to use more than one of them, to spread the risk out.

Regardless of what their motives where ( e-peen? ), I feel such events hold some value, if only to remind people that no website or online service is fail-proof, and that it may be a bad idea to depend entirely on a single website, for gaming or any other purpose.

( And yes, I can't deny a certain satisfaction, at the mental image of thousands of Call of Duty kids raging because they can't play their games for a few hours. )

I call BS on the whole DDoS thing. And it especially wasn't those Phantom kiddies. No announcement before the downtime, and then, a while after people notice that Steam is offline, "oh yeah, by the way, that was us, like, totally!" …yes, sure. Also, the way in which all geographical regions went down almost simultaneously, heavily suggests an internal issue, and not an attack. Of course 1000 scriptkiddie groups will try to claim responsibility, but most likely it was nothing of the sorts.

Still, I think it's good that people occasionally get reminded about what it really means for them if they "buy" games from a service with a dependency on remote servers.

Speaking of which, from being forced to try the whole Steam Offline Mode thing several times due to local Internet outages, I feel confident in saying that it's very likely to not work when you would need it to. In my case, Steam would usually just try to connect for hours, not even giving me the option to choose offline mode. Or it might offer offline mode, and upon choosing it immediately fall back to the "retry or go offline" dialogue, ad infinitum. Or in the few cases that it might agree to start in offline mode, many single-player games still won't run because they implemented their own online dependency (some just due to being poorly written, such as crashing if they can't access Steam for achievements).

It's hit and miss, to say the least. And quite frankly, for software that I'm paying for, that's simply unacceptable. There should not be an external entity telling people when and how they can use the software they bought, whether it's deliberately or by accident. Online DRM is a defective design, there's no two ways of looking at it.