Today's Steam outage may have been part of a massive DDoS attack targeting Xbox, PlayStation, Riot, and other game companies

Computer code reflected in glasses arranged in Danbury, U.K., on Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2020. In the spring, hackers managed to insert malicious code into a software product from an IT provider called SolarWinds Corp., whose client list includes 300,000 institutions. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images — (Image credit: Getty Images)

Steam went offline earlier today in an odd but thankfully brief hitch that may have been a small part of a much bigger thing: Xbox, PlayStation, Riot Games, and Epic all suffered a very sudden spike in outage reports at around the same time last night, and that's led to speculation that it might be part of a massive DDoS targeting online game services.

As seen in outage reports on Downdetector, the timing is awfully coincidental.

Steam:

Epic Games Store:

PlayStation Network:

Xbox Live:

Xbox outages on Downdetector — (Image credit: Downdetector)

League of Legends:

Valorant:

Fortnite:

At a little before 11 pm ET on October 6, Riot reported "game disconnection issues" on its League of Legends and Valorant status pages. Those status reports remain active for now. Shortly before that, reports of Steam and Riot being hit with a DDoS attack also began to surface on Reddit and social media.

Steam being DDOS'd from r/DotA2

Steam and Riot Games are facing large DDoS attacks currently. TCPShield, reports that they are also dealing with TCP Carpet Bomb attacks on their network. Word on the street its the same AISURU Botnet that hit 29.69tpbs today. — (Image credit: vxdb (Twitter))

As reported by Cybernews, there's some speculation that the attack was launched via the massive Airsuru botnet. A PC Mag report says the Aisuru botnet was determined to be the source of a "hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks twice as large as anything seen on the internet before" reported by Cloudflare in September.

It's not clear why Steam would be hit with subsequent attacks while the other services were spared, and in fact the execution of a large-scale DDoS attack against multiple gaming services is entirely unconfirmed at this point, although the timing and scale of the problems pretty strongly suggests that there's more than just a whole lot of bad luck going around. In a statement provided to PC Gamer, Riot Games spokesman Joe Hixson acknowledged that something is going on, across multiple companies, but didn't speculate on the underlying cause.

"We can confirm that our teams have been working to resolve intermittent network issues affecting our games over the past ~36 hours," Hixson said. "Like many companies over the last day or two, we've faced challenges to network stability and taken proactive steps to protect the player experience. We've temporarily disabled ranked queues in some regions and enabled ranked points loss compensation where appropriate. For the latest status, players can check directly in each game client. We appreciate everyone's patience while we work to get things fully back to normal."

As for why this is happening, that's a matter of conjecture too, but the most common assumption seems to be a simple one: It's a demonstration of power. "An important part of selling your product is a proof of its capabilities," redditor paulHarkonen wrote in the Steam subreddit. "This is a great way to demonstrate you can take down even resilient targets."

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.

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