Steam and other major networks are experiencing widespread service issues, with signs pointing to a massive DDoS attack.
If you’ve been struggling to log into Steam or your favorite Riot Games titles today, you’re not alone. Starting late Monday night (Oct 6, U.S. time) and rolling into Tuesday morning, thousands of players around the world began reporting that Steam, League of Legends, VALORANT, and even other online services were down, and there’s a good chance a massive DDoS attack is to blame.
At first, it seemed like the usual server hiccup. But as the night went on, reports spread across social media, and now it looks like something much bigger might be going on.
Is Steam Down Right Now on October 7?
Yes, Steam is currently down. According to reports from multiple outage trackers, the problem kicked off around late Monday night, when players began losing access to Steam’s store, community pages, and login services. Riot Games followed soon after, disabling ranked queues for League of Legends as it investigated “disconnection issues.”
Update, October 7, 10:51 AM PT
Steam seems to be slowly coming back online, but full stability might take a little longer. Riot’s services also look like they’ve recovered, for the most part.
What’s making this whole thing even more interesting is that Steam and Riot weren’t the only services hit. According to DownDetector, several other major services are also dealing with outages right now, including T-Mobile, GitLab, Lumen, RingCentral, EA, Google, Microsoft, and more.
So, what exactly is going on?
DDoS Attack Suspected
According to several cybersecurity researchers, this all points to a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. While neither Valve (Steam) nor Riot have publicly confirmed this yet, a lot of experts believe a botnet called Aisuru is behind today’s chaos.
Aisuru is a huge botnet network—think of it as an army of hacked devices all sending junk traffic at once to overwhelm servers. It’s been linked to DDoS attacks as big as 29.69 terabits per second recently, which is absolutely massive.
That’s where things stand right now. Have you been hit by today’s outage? Did you notice your downloads or matches suddenly disconnect? Let us know how things looked on your end in the comments.
