Steam is down for UK and some European users - UPDATED

UPDATE: Steam is now available again for UK users. It was unavailable for two to three hours for many people, with no official word from Valve so far as to the problem.

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Gaming platform Steam is currently offline for UK-based users, and users in parts of France and other nearby European countries. The service, operated by US-based Valve, is the world's largest gaming store and platform by player count. Gamers use it to play titles old and new, from mainstream releases like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Star Wars: The Fallen Empire, to more niche examples like Rimworld and Darkest Dungeon.

Steam has been even more popular in recent weeks thank to the Covid-19 pandemic, with people around the world in lockdown, and facing weeks or months more with limited activity outside the home. The platform recently broke its record for concurrent users, with over 20 million people across the world using the service simultaneously.

Valve has as yet made no announcement about the outage, which has been ongoing for two hours at the time of writing. According to Down Detector, problems first began at around 11:30am BST.

Offline games are still playable on the service, but the Store and Marketplace are unreachable. The problem does not appear to have affected other regions at present.

A map compiled by 'Istheservicedown' shows that problems have been reported in the UK, France, and other nearby European countries.

Steam outage map

We will continue to update the story as more details become clear.