Steam’s Annual Winter Sale Disrupted By DDoS Attack; Phantom Squad And PoodleCorp Responsible?

Steam servers were disrupted last night, coinciding with the annual Winter Sale. Infamous Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) hackers Phantom Squad and Poodle Corp had claimed responsibility for the attack.

Valve's Steam service went down including the store, friends lists, and game servers, which were unavailable for a couple of hours. This was timely as the annual Winter sale was about to kick off wherein massive discounts will be up for grabs for major online games.

#Steam and #Origin Servers Down? #PhantomSquad and #PoodleCorp Claim Responsibility | https://t.co/w3qrPjAiKf #Gaming #DDoS #Christmas pic.twitter.com/WxMWYYVRK9

— HackRead (@HackRead) December 23, 2016

Since the sale's launch on Dec. 22, activities on the server were relatively high due to the massive discounts and gamers were on a buying spree. So, it is not surprising the Steam was running a bit slower than its usual pace. Then, the server went completely offline, totally inaccessible. Gamers and players flooded Twitter asking what happened. As it turns out, it was not only Steam that was offline. Hackread reported that Down Detector confirmed that EA servers were also down. Down Detector is an online service providing updates regarding online outages. One of the iconic DDoS attackers, Phantom Squad, took to Twitter claiming they were behind the attack, and they brought in a new member who was responsible for targeting PlayStation, EA, "GTA," "Pokemon GO," Blizzard, and "League of Legends." They call themselves PoodleCorp. It is notable that last year, the same group, Phantom Squad, took down PSN and Xbox Live, according to Express UK. The report furthered that shortly after the Twitter post that they had initiated the "major DDoS attack," the account was deactivated.

#PhantomSquad Twitter account now suspended after claiming responsibility for #Steam outage pic.twitter.com/NOjKgjW7BN — Colm McGlinchey (@ColmMcGlinchey) December 23, 2016

Meanwhile, there has been no official word from Valve whether the claims were true and what the cause of the issue was, per GameSpot. But as of this 11 am PT, Steam servers were back online.

The annual Winter sale is joined by Valve's Steam Awards, in which nominations began last month. Currently, users can now vote for a winner in various categories each single day. If a user votes, he or she earns a trading card. Winners will be revealed on Dec. 31.