Published , by Kevin Tucker
Published , by Kevin Tucker
In our modern, computerized world, people want their information, games, and memes — and they want them now. As such, when a major service like Steam goes offline, people might start to get irritated. Fortunately, Steam is a service with a largely reliable back-end network of servers, and usually only ever goes down under tremendous loads or for scheduled maintenance. Still, sometimes things happen, and we've got the information PC players need to know in order to figure out if Steam is down and when they may be able to expect scheduled server maintenance.
By and large, Steam has made a name for itself for being reliable. However, it is sometimes prone to outages, particularly when major summer and winter sales start coming around. Fortunately, there is a website that users can check in order to know whether or not Steam servers are currently down. Not only that, the website also provides server status for games like Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2, plus information about server load capacities by region.
The website is simply called Steam Status, and PC players may want to bookmark it for reference any time Steam appears to be acting up.
Basic routine maintenance on Steam servers is performed on Tuesdays, with some outages occurring generally around the afternoon to evening times — around 1:00 - 3:00 p.m. Pacific Time, more or less. There's not exactly any set schedule for what sort of maintenance is performed, at least not anything we can provide a reference to here, but it's basically common knowledge that if Steam starts acting up on a Tuesday, it's likely a temporary issue caused by routine maintenance.
Hopefully this information should be enough to stop players from getting too irrationally angry if Steam servers or Steam-based games appear to be down. With this useful knowledge tucked neatly away in the recesses of the mind, be sure to stop by Shacknews' 2022 video game release date calendar to learn more about all the great games to land on PCs and home consoles this year.