One of the world’s largest PC game platforms, Steam suddenly ran into serious service trouble on October 21, with players unable to get into the desktop client or the web store and some hitting an “E502 L2” error message. The timing could not have been worse, because the Steam Next Fest was in full swing and thousands of players were queuing up to download demos of upcoming games, only to find the store itself would not open. The good news is that in hands-on testing, launching and updating games that were already installed, plus several online multiplayer features, still worked normally — so this was never a full Steam blackout.
Could a Serious PHP Flaw Be the Real Cause?
What makes this outage more interesting is that it landed right on top of a major security crisis sweeping across websites worldwide. On October 21, a European cybersecurity agency warned that PHP, the programming language used across the web for building sites, contains two serious vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to execute malicious code remotely without needing to authenticate first. The fallout was significant enough that several European governments and other organisations temporarily shut down parts of their websites as a precaution. Outside media speculated that Steam may have been carrying out emergency maintenance in response to the same flaws, but Valve has not confirmed any link between the outage and the PHP bugs, so the two should not be treated as one and the same thing just yet.
Steam Store Back to Normal
Luckily, the Steam store was never down for long, and the platform soon confirmed that the store had returned to normal operation. On the security side, the official PHP project has already shipped patches and is urging site administrators running affected systems to update as soon as possible. While there is currently no evidence that Steam was actually hacked during the incident, the wave of disrupted sites across the globe served as another sharp reminder that even the most dependable-looking online services can go dark the moment a serious security problem shows up. Exactly what happened inside Valve on the day remains unclear until the company offers an official explanation.