Steam Winter Sale may have caused server capacity issues for the game distribution platform yesterday, December 22. The game industry has set their eyes on the annual holiday sale that resulted to Steam servers to crash. Valve has yet to confirm if the entire Steam server is back but it seems like the platform is slowly getting back to normal status.

Steam is PC's premiere digital game distribution avenue. While there is still no confirmed reason as to why the downtime transpired, a third-party Steam server tracker, "SteamDB" had shown signs of the server coming back to life today. Still, there is still no assurance that Steam will be coming back for good today. Valve still has not responded inquiries as of the moment.

Last Christmas, Steam also had a hiccup with their servers. Caching errors shortly enabled users to access other usernames and security breach transpired in the form of credit card information hacking, before Valve was able to resolve the issue.

Fortunately this year, Steam did not encounter the same issue again. But buyers waiting for the Steam Winter Sale are still on the hunt to buy the best deals on PC Games in the platform. It seems purchases will have to wait as Steam fully recovers. Official communication is expected from Valve within the day.

PCGamesN, however, reports, that an apparent Steam DDoS attack haunted the entire platform. Still a bit shaky, the Steam platform is visibly coming back online now but caution - expect it to have intermittent outages as players all over the world are still trying to enter PC's digital distribution platform.

Phantom Squad, a self-proclaimed cyber terrorist group declared on Twitter that they are responsible for the Steam downtime. In their announcement, they said they released a "major Steam DDoS attack" which impacted Valve's gaming service. Their Twitter account, though, was suspended right away.

Last November, the same group claimed they were responsible for a short-time outage on Steam services. That followed downtime for "Rainbow Six Siege" as well. It can be recalled that they threatened Microsoft, Sony and Steam that attacks will happen again during the Christmas holiday season. For now, here is an interesting theory on why the Steam platform went down: