Today is Tuesday, which means it's been one week since the last time I (or one of my colleagues) opened the group work chat for PC Gamer dot com and asked, "Hey, is Steam down?" And if it's a Tuesday, then the answer is always: Yes, Steam is down for its regularly planned maintenance.
In fact, Steam goes down almost every Tuesday for routine maintenance. It's usually pretty quick, and maybe over by the time you're done reading this. So no, I'm not surprised when, like clockwork, half the internet asks the same thing…every Tuesday.
If anything, I'm more surprised by Valve's lack of clear indicators on Steam communicating that it's normal, but the timing itself seems perfectly reasonable. Steam's FAQ notes it tries to avoid downtime during peak hours (noon to 11:00 pm PT), so maintenance is usually sometime early morning or late afternoon Pacific Time.
Valve keeps it on a fairly regular weekly schedule, but there's no perfect time to avoid impacting all of its users. It's also worth remembering that the game developers relying on Steam's infrastructure can't control those outages—so there's nothing to do but be patient if you're trying to right-click invite [Steam Friend ID] to your multiplayer game.
The good news is that Steam maintenance is typically under an hour. Routine housekeeping is for tasks you may not see the direct benefits of, like security patches or a hardware update, but major changes to the store or client are noted on the Steam News Hub. Like Steam's recent language-specific update to game review scores.
As for a server status page, you can use Valve's official Steam Charts to see if the 'players online now' number just dove off a cliff, but I like the SteamDB tool, Steamstat.us, for a more detailed look.
If you happen to wander back to this article and it's not on a Tuesday, then you're safe to fly into a panic about what you'll do with your unplanned free time and start speculating on disaster scenarios. Maybe check the news hub first, but yeah I'm right there in the boat with you—what am I supposed to do on a Friday night offline?
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