Steam Unavailable; Seattle Area Power Outage
As many Steam users have noticed, the service has been unavailable all day and complaining in the Steam forums isnt possible, as those are down as well. The reason for this downtime is that the Seattle area was hit by a storm last night, taking out power. According to the Seattle Times story, it could take until midnight tomorrow before power is restored everywhere. With Steam unavailable, people are unable to play games they purchased over Valve's content delivery platform, which certainly shows one of the downsides to a service like this. Update: the forums are now slowly loading, and have this message.
There is currently a wide spread power outage in Bellevue/Seattle impacting Steam Server availability. Unfortunately ETA for when the power will be restored is unknown as the power company will only work on restoring it once the storm has eased and the high winds have died down. Any issues you are experiencing with connecting to Steam are only temporary, as this isn't an end-user issue.
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No wonder : ( Poor Valve, that's some nasty PR. Too bad they didn't have generators!
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I think that's the biggest problem. Sure, it's not their "fault" that a storm/power outage hit it, but I think it's their still their responsibility that they don't have authentication servers located anywhere else. With around 100,000 people online at anytime on their system, the fact that you also need the authentication to play singleplayer or use their tools, the fact that offline mode is busted, I can't imagine how they didn't have a second authentication server somewhere else.
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not to mention enable offline mode if you are currently unable to connect (not just because Valve's servers are hosed, but if your ISP is having a massive outage, or perhaps another tier 1 fight like the one between Level 3 and Cogent back in October 2005 ( http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/10/10/HNlevel3cogent_1.html ).
It's sad that something like this is what's necessary to emphasize the importance of specific feature requests, but there it is.
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It might have...I remember seeing that blog about the team that kept InterNIC online and some of their customers despite Katrina hitting New Orleans. http://interdictor.livejournal.com/
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