At some point on the morning of December 23, Valve’s PC gaming platform, Steam, went offline. This is especially detrimental right now, as the Steam Holiday Sale, typically the company’s largest sales period of the year, began less than 24 hours before.

Steam Winter Sale On Now! Plus, Vote For The Steam Awards! #SteamSale #SteamAwards https://t.co/2Ltx8oYpVP pic.twitter.com/T3iqTvsPgI

— Steam (@Steam) December 22, 2016

Not only was the Steam store temporarily out of commission, but all matchmaking, friends, and game hosting services were offline too. Additionally, valvesoftware.com and teamfortress.com were briefly impacted, but both were brought back online before the gaming platform returned to normal operations around 11:00 AM PST.

Although all services have now resumed, Valve has not made an official statement as to the cause of the outage at this time, but rumors are afoot regarding potential cyber attacks or directed denial of service initiatives from hacker groups who frequently target websites on the holidays. This could have, of course, simply been tied to the massive onset of web traffic generated by online shoppers descending on the websites during the opening days of the Steam Holiday Sale.

Regardless of how it occurred, PC gamers were repeatedly hitting refresh, hopeful that the could return to regularly throwing money at their screens and voting on their picks for the first annual Steam Awards. The good news is that everything is back to normal now and, at the very least, perhaps this will provide some incentive for Valve to tack on an extra day to the sale so that we might make up for the lost time spending our hard earned cash.

Have you been affected by the Steam Holiday Sale outage? What are your thoughts on the cause of this unexpected situation? Hit us up in the comments section with your opinions and conspiracy theories (no matter how outlandish) and stay here at DFTG for more updates on the situation as information continues to disseminate.