Twas the day before Christmas and Steam is having some serious issues

Original story:

It's the day before Christmas and all through the house, nobody is using Steam, not even a mouse—because, you guessed it, Steam is down.

It's unclear what's going on, but at a little before 2 pm ET on a Wednesday, we're guessing this not routine maintenance. Steam appears to be completely gone: The unofficial Steam Status website is reporting websocket errors, and says the entire Steam store, community, and web API are offline. SteamStat page views are also jumping up, which is a pretty reliable indicator that something's gone wrong.

That's not good. (Image credit: Unofficial Steam Status)

Downdetector is also indicating some serious issues with Steam, ongoing since a little after 1 pm ET.

P0nchik95 on the Steam subreddit has a theory—I don't know how likely it is to be accurate (not very, I suspect) but it's not terrible advice anyway:

Comment from r/Steam

We've reached out to Valve to see if they've got anything to say about it, and will keep an eye on things in the meantime. Naturally, we will also update when Steam is back.