On Monday, October 26, thousands of Steam users found themselves unable to log into their accounts, stuck instead on an endless 'Loading user data…' screen.

Downdetector reports began spiking at around 4:30am ET / 9:30am BST, with VICE noting a peak of 1,134 reports at 9:55am, 74% of them centered on login problems.

The reports came from around the world — TechRadar's live coverage cites users from Japan to Spain, and VICE adds posters from the United States, Poland and Indonesia — and both PC and Steam Deck were affected.

Some Reddit users reported the problem appearing right after activating a game key or downloading a demo.

The strangest part is that Steam wasn't technically down.

TechRadar observed that the Steam dashboard stayed green across the board, meaning this was not a network outage or the usual Wednesday maintenance window — all of Valve's standard advice, from restarting the client to clearing the download cache or changing download region, simply didn't apply.

VICE confirms the Store and Community pages kept working in browsers while the Library remained locked. GAMINGbible similarly reports that users could browse the storefront on the web but couldn't reach their game libraries from the desktop client.

Kotaku notes this same bug has cropped up periodically for years, including posts a week ago and even years earlier.

The evidence piled up on social media all morning. Kotaku's own writer was among the affected, logging in only to watch 'Loading user data…' spin for minutes on end with relaunches doing nothing.

Users reported that uninstalling and reinstalling Steam, changing passwords, and running the client as administrator all failed, according to VICE.

TechRadar relayed one workaround — quitting Steam, disconnecting the PC from the network, reopening the app, then reconnecting — that helped some but not others, while Kotaku mentions a license-page trick of removing a game demo in a browser that also only worked for a subset of users.

One Reddit user told VICE they paid for a game during the outage and couldn't even see whether it was in their library.

For a platform that is effectively the front door to PC gaming, even a client-side bug that blocks the Library is high-stakes.

GamesRadar+'s own newsroom saw the split firsthand: one writer in the Eastern US could boot games without issue while a coworker hit the endless loop moments later and repeated reboots didn't help.

By mid-afternoon the story resolved the only way these episodes usually do.

TechRadar reported the first drop in Downdetector reports after more than five hours, and by 16:03 UTC declared the issue fixed for most people, with reports back to baseline and users confirming on social media and Reddit that they could log in again.

PC Guide adds that unofficial status trackers showed most regions 'Recovered', though steamstat.us still showed high load in some areas, and Valve's game APIs for Counter-Strike, TF2, Dota 2 and Deadlock had kept working normally throughout.

Kotaku's writer found Steam had righted itself mid-article. The catch: Valve never commented on the cause, so the bug may well return.

For devoted Steam users, Kotaku's conclusion is the one that rings truest: this problem 'comes and goes', all sorts of fixes have been proposed over the years, and the most reliable remedy is simply to go do something else until Valve pushes a fix — which, in Kotaku's experience, usually lands within a few hours to a day.