SpellSword: However for the last few days many people have been unable to log in to steam or stay connected once they manage to do so. Seems to be a problem on their side of things judging by the chatter I'm reading.
timppu: Steam was down, was it on Thursday?
http://www.issteamdown.com/ confirmed it, and I couldn't log in either. Not sure if it was some scheduled maintenance.
Now it seems to be up (according to the aforementioned page; I didn't try to log in now because Steam refuses to do that when I have VPN connection to my work active, like right now).
If you use steamstatus (
http://steamstat.us/), it shows the status of each steam service, and how long the uptime have been. For example, the store page may be down, but the client servers can still be up (and vice versa) I it to be a little bit more helpful than issteamdown. It also auto refreshes constantly every 10 sec or so, so it is easy to see if a service comes online again.