Valve officially apologizes and clears things up about Christmas incident

If you were available in front of your PC screen during Christmas last week, you might have seen what happened to Steam yourself when millions of users were met with weird Store pages and accounts that don’t belong to them. Valve cleared things up today and apologized about the whole thing to all users.

Last Friday, December 25, many features of Steam were taken down in order to prevent any harm caused by the hacking wave that hit the network until it was brought back up and running. The reason that this happened was because of some DDoS attacks directed at Valve’s network at Christmas. However, when Valve tried to counter the damage, it caused a caching malfunction that gave wrong pages to users by mistake.

“In response to this specific attack, caching rules managed by a Steam web caching partner were deployed in order to both minimize the impact on Steam Store servers and continue to route legitimate user traffic,” the company wrote. “During the second wave of this attack, a second caching configuration was deployed that incorrectly cached web traffic for authenticated users. This configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store responses which were generated for other users.”

Valve said that the affected users’ numbers were around 30 thousand. The firm will continue to work on its network services in order to prevent future incidents from happening. You can read about the whole thing in the official post here.