Steam’s Crapped-Out Christmas, Or How Valve Got Their Groove Back

You know how it is during the holidays. There's a lot of food, a lot of alcohol, a lot of damn people everywhere, and a lot of dumbassery and/or debauchery. Mistakes are made. It happens. I can't count the amount of times I've woken up in a strangers' apartment wondering why my undercrackers are stuck in the ceiling fan around Christmas.

That's just what the holidays do to people. We go a little nuts. Over in the video game world, they don't fare much better. Remember last Christmas, The Great PSN Hack? That sucked. This year was Steam's turn, and it all went just as badly.

Yes indeed. On Christmas day, Steam users worldwide were reporting something really goddamn strange (and terrifying): they seemed to have complete access to other random users' private info.

Here's Kotaku with the skinny:

‘Various players across the world logged into their Steam clients… to find their homepage displaying Russian or another random language. When they checked the "account info" section of Steam, the digital store showed them another user's account, complete with e-mail addresses, buying history, and other private information. Merry Christmas!'

Viewing details on Steam's website would also give you access to others' accounts; it was an all round bad time. Valve took the store offline to fix this huge eff up, but that was fairly darn hairy for a moment there.