Steam is one of, if not the largest video game market platform on the planet, featuring thousands of games and the infrastructure to play them. While competitors like the Epic Games Store and GOG do exist, Steam retains millions of players all around the world. It's a complex system, and things are liable to go wrong. Here's how to check if Steam is having issues.

Is Steam Down? How to Check

Steam rarely has problems on a large scale: the store frequently experiences slowdowns during busy periods, such as during the highly anticipated Summer and Winter sales, during which thousands of games are discounted heavily, but Steam otherwise remains functional much of the time.

When Steam does have problems, they grind gaming to a halt - players are unable to make purchases, interact with their games' community and sometimes can't play their games.

Several services are dedicated to tracking outages at Steam: DownDetector does so for many websites, and the Twitter page Steam Status also keeps track of this information. If you are wondering what problems are going on at Steam, it might be worthwhile to bookmark these pages for quick access.

This article was originally published on dbltap as Is Steam Down? How to Check.