Valve: 34,000 Steam Users Affected by Caching Issues

Valve released a statement after five days about the caching problems Steam experienced on Christmas Day. The issue arose while Valve was fighting a ddos ​​attack and 34,000 users of the platform are said to have been affected by the issues.

Valve is making the statements on the Steam website. To date, the company had only communicated about the issue in the form of written responses to various gaming news sites. The caching issues stemmed from countermeasures against a ddos ​​attack on Steam’s servers. “Traffic to the Steam Store increased by more than 2000% relative to the average traffic level during the Steam Sale,” the company said. To fend off this attack while continuing to serve users, Valve and its web caching partners set up different caching rules. During the second wave of the ddos ​​attack, Valve instituted yet another, this time malfunctioning, caching rules that led to the issues users ran into on December 25. This took a total of 90 minutes. After that, the Steam Store temporarily went offline and when it was available again, the caching issues were resolved.

Account holders using the Steam Store while the second set of custom caching rules was in effect could see web pages intended for other Steam users. These include information such as partial credit card numbers, partial phone numbers, email addresses, and the country in which the other user is located. In the rarer cases where users were shown a page from another user who had items in their shopping cart at the time, more data was shown. Those cases involved full names, billing addresses, and phone numbers. Valve emphasizes that passwords could not be retrieved and that no unauthorized purchases were possible. The company also apologizes and says it is working with its caching partners to see how this problem can be prevented in the future.