Steam is down for many —here’s what we know about the ‘loading user data’ issue mark.wilson@futurenet.com (Mark Wilson) | usagoldmines.com

Steam is having a bad start to the week, according to thousands of users who are reporting that a “loading user data” issue is preventing them from logging in.

Reports about the problem have been on the rise on Downdetector since around 4.30am ET / 9.30am BST, and have risen particularly sharply in the last hour. There are also countless reports on social media and Reddit of people experiencing the same issue.

There’s no been no official statement or update from Steam about the problem, but here’s all the latest news on the gaming platform’s apparent outage today…

Reports are on the rise

Today’s Steam issue has been a bit of a slow burn rather than a sudden outage, but reports are now increasing sharply.

On Downdetector, they’ve now hit a peak of almost 500 in the US and about 450 in the UK. However, it does seem to be a global issue according to a Reddit thread, with users in Germany, the Netherlands and Russia all saying they can’t log in.

Over on the Steam Dashboard, there’s no report of an official problem — so this appears to be a software bug or issue rather than a service outage.

The screen of pain

This is the screen that thousands of Steam users are reporting seeing right now — and it seems resistant to most of the commonly-known fixes.

Many users have reported closing their games and restarting their PCs, but without any joy. This also doesn’t seem to be a maintenance outage — those typically takes place on Wednesdays at 00:00 UTC.

The Steam Dashboard continues to show no official issues, but hopefully we’ll get some official guidance from Steam soon…