[headdie]

So Totalbiscuit has picked up on Steam having issues, looks to be caching related but best advice is to avoid logging in, especially to the steam store until Valve has issued a statement on just what happened

[Scourge of Ages]

I have definitely noticed problems of this sort, myself.

EDIT: Immediately after posting, it seems to be working.

[NGTM-1R]

I can't manage to browse the store at all, it keeps sending me back to the main list of stuff on sale or on to DLC of stuff I'm looking at without rhyme or reason. Clicking things from the primary list of stuff on sale merely resets it.

Hell, it's just stopped recognizing games I actually own from its sale list.

[Mongoose]

At one point over the past few days, it had me logged in yet not, as it couldn't actually access my inventory so I could check which of this year's trading cards I'd earned.  And then when I did buy a couple of games, I never received any confirmation e-mails (and indeed received a flat-out "Your purchase has failed" error message), yet the games are still in my inventory regardless.  No idea what the hell's going on in Gabeland.

[Polpolion]

At one point over the past few days, it had me logged in yet not, as it couldn't actually access my inventory so I could check which of this year's trading cards I'd earned.  And then when I did buy a couple of games, I never received any confirmation e-mails (and indeed received a flat-out "Your purchase has failed" error message), yet the games are still in my inventory regardless.  No idea what the hell's going on in Gabeland.

Was your credit card charged? I haven't had any problems beyond normal steam issues.

[deathspeed]

The only issues I have noticed so far are search-related.  For instance, I could search on "Call of Duty" and see that there were 83 pages (which sounds about right, under Bobby Kotick's Activision, so that isn't an issue), but when I would try to sort them by price it would say "no results found."  I haven't bought anything recently, but my trading cards from the sale are showing up OK and no problems with my inventory.

[Mongoose]

At one point over the past few days, it had me logged in yet not, as it couldn't actually access my inventory so I could check which of this year's trading cards I'd earned.  And then when I did buy a couple of games, I never received any confirmation e-mails (and indeed received a flat-out "Your purchase has failed" error message), yet the games are still in my inventory regardless.  No idea what the hell's going on in Gabeland.

Was your credit card charged? I haven't had any problems beyond normal steam issues.

It was for the one that actually went through, but not for the second one, and in that case I actually got a follow-up email saying, "Your payment failed, but we'll hold the item in your cart with its current discount for the next 72 hours so you can try again."  I did, and that time it went through successfully.

[BloodEagle]

For anyone who hasn't been keeping track of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkSslseq9Y8 (Tom Scott: Seeing Other People's Steam Accounts: The Christmas Caching Catastrophe)

That's what went wrong.

I would imagine the sporadic downtime we've seen over the past couple of days has been Valve triple-checking everything to make sure this isn't going to happen again.

On the PSA side, if you checked your account details /before/ they shut everything down that first time, there's a slight possibility that your account detail information was visible to others.

[headdie]

TotalBiscuit has made a followup looking into just what happened
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esmKdMDvSGI

[karajorma]

http://kotaku.com/valve-still-hasnt-told-steam-users-about-the-christmas-1750114754

Most of all, it’s infuriating that Valve thinks this is okay, that they can just fire off a press statement and let the crisis blow over without even telling customers that the last four digits of their credit cards may have been inadvertently shown to the world. How can such a smart company, one that’s made such stellar, polished games and dominated the PC gaming landscape for nearly a decade now, be so damn stupid?

Cause they'll get away with it. What are you going to do? Not buy from Steam? That ship has already sailed.

[MP-Ryan]

FYI:  http://store.steampowered.com/news/19852/

[karajorma]

I know, I noticed that they posted that after the story had been written on Kotaku. You've worked computer security IIRC, do you think waiting nearly a week to tell people about a computer breach like this one is acceptable?

[AdmiralRalwood]

A couple quotes jump out at me:

These cached requests did not include full credit card numbers, user passwords, or enough data to allow logging in as or completing a transaction as another user.

no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information

Assuming these are accurate, this is significantly less of a big deal than people were saying it was.

[MP-Ryan]

I know, I noticed that they posted that after the story had been written on Kotaku. You've worked computer security IIRC, do you think waiting nearly a week to tell people about a computer breach like this one is acceptable?

No, I've never worked computer security.  And from the content of that blog - Ralwood's excerpts - I think the wait was likely to ascertain exactly what happened and what was lost.

[Veers]

Is anybody else having issues purchasing from Steam right now?,

[Polpolion]

A couple quotes jump out at me:

These cached requests did not include full credit card numbers, user passwords, or enough data to allow logging in as or completing a transaction as another user.

no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information

Assuming these are accurate, this is significantly less of a big deal than people were saying it was.

I was going to make a post to this effect but they did mention billing addresses, which can be a bit of a big deal.

[karajorma]

No, I've never worked computer security.  And from the content of that blog - Ralwood's excerpts - I think the wait was likely to ascertain exactly what happened and what was lost.

And if you don't know, don't you think you should be telling people to take basic precautions? You know, like every other site that has even the danger of a leak does? As kotaku mentioned, they did give out more than enough information to say, steal someone's Netflix or X-Box account by using the information to do some social engineering.

But **** it, it's Steam. People are going to defend their ****ty practices while screaming bloody murder if anyone else did it. 

[The E]

A couple quotes jump out at me:

These cached requests did not include full credit card numbers, user passwords, or enough data to allow logging in as or completing a transaction as another user.

no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information

Assuming these are accurate, this is significantly less of a big deal than people were saying it was.

Actually it wasn't, as identifying information (home address, paypal-linked email address, last four digits of the credit card number) was leaked. Not directly harmful, but not exactly harmless either.

[AdmiralRalwood]

A couple quotes jump out at me:

These cached requests did not include full credit card numbers, user passwords, or enough data to allow logging in as or completing a transaction as another user.

no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information

Assuming these are accurate, this is significantly less of a big deal than people were saying it was.

Actually it wasn't, as identifying information (home address, paypal-linked email address, last four digits of the credit card number) was leaked. Not directly harmful, but not exactly harmless either.

"Not as big a deal as people were saying" != "harmless". I concur with everything you just said there; it also doesn't contradict what I said in any way.

[The E]

I don't know, I consider these things to be a pretty big deal.