George In The Meta
Is Steam down? Stuck on Loading User Data
By George In The Meta · · updated
Yes, Steam is still partly down. Since Monday morning, 26 October, the Steam desktop client has been stuck on "Loading User Data" for a lot of people. Mine got through at 1:42pm GMT, about an hour and a half after I first tried. The store and community pages still load in a browser, and Valve hasn't said anything about it.
Back up for me, 1:42pm GMT: my client finally loaded my library. Now finally getting to try the demo. It isn't fixed for everyone: TechRadar's live blog still had no sign of a fix and no word from Valve at 2:26pm GMT (TechRadar).
What's wrong with Steam today?
The Steam client signs you in, then sits on "Loading User Data" and never gets to your library. Reports on Downdetector started around 9am GMT and jumped again around 11am GMT, with 240 by 12:08pm (Gaming Bible). TechRadar says thousands of users are reporting it, with no official statement from Steam (TechRadar).
The store and community pages still work in a web browser; it's the desktop client that can't load your games. SteamDB's unofficial tracker has been showing the Store, Community, Web API and Connection Managers as up (Notebookcheck), which is why some outage checkers say Steam is fine.
It's also the last day of Steam Next Fest, which ends at 10am Pacific, 5pm GMT, today (Steamworks), so it's landed on a day a lot of people are trying demos.
What happened when I tried to get the Nomad Drive demo?
I was trying to get the Nomad Drive demo, and I've been trying since about 10 past 12 GMT. It appears to be the whole client. The one time I got through the client, the demo was blocked as well. Trying to install it, between 12:14 and 12:15pm GMT, gave me a box titled "Failure" that said An error occurred while installing AppID 4568400: "No licenses".
AppID 4568400 is the Nomad Drive Demo on Steam. About a minute later, the client's requests started timing out, and since then I've been stuck on Loading User Data. Restarting the laptop didn't fix it, and neither did clearing Steam's cache folders so they rebuilt from empty.
Is it to do with demos and new games?
The Loading User Data hang might be linked to getting something new on Steam. I'm not the only one where it started that way. Gaming Bible quotes one user who "tried to download a demo, kept getting an error, restarted and now i cant get past the same login screen", and another who hit it right after activating a key (Gaming Bible). Valve hasn't said what's causing it, so that's a pattern in the reports, not a confirmed cause.
What do the Steam logs show?
Signing in works. Steam's connection log shows the logon response coming back OK every time. What fails is the next step: the client asks Steam for the details of every app and package on the account, 1,124 apps and 419 packages on mine, about 72 KB, and that request times out. The client tries again every 2 minutes, and it timed out every time from 12:15pm GMT until 1:41pm GMT, apart from one small request at 1:25pm. These are the first lines from my client's appinfo log, the request at 12:13pm GMT and the timeout two minutes later:
Requesting 1124 apps, 419 packages (meta data, 0 prev attempts, expected 72 KB)UpdatesJob: finished Timeout, apps updated 0 (0 KB), packages updated 0 (0 KB)UpdatesJob: apps still needs updates, run again
With the cache cleared, the client only asked for 2 apps and 402 packages, and that still timed out. The request is tiny and Steam isn't answering it, so this isn't something wrong with your PC. If you want to check yours, the file is logs\appinfo_log.txt in your Steam folder.
At 1:41pm GMT it finally went through. The client downloaded 229 apps over HTTP and logged UpdatesJob: finished OK, apps updated 1054 (6530 KB), and a few seconds later it started loading my library. Smaller follow-up requests were still timing out after that, but the client worked.
Why does Steam just say Loading User Data?
That's what annoys me most. It doesn't present to you anything to say that the thing has gone wrong, right? For someone looking at Loading User Data, that looks like it is working correctly.
If I didn't have the subscriptions to go and Tailscale in and actually look at what was wrong, I wouldn't see that it was getting hung on Steam's side every 2 minutes, would I? I would just be looking at Loading User Data, with no way to understand: am I at fault? Is my computer broken? Is Steam broken? There's nothing there prompting you to go and google "is Steam down" until you've been annoyed with it for however many minutes your patience lasts.
Has Steam gone down before this week?
Yes. On 21 October, five days earlier, the Steam store went down in both the client and the browser with the error "E502 L2 - We were unable to service your request. Please try again later." It was in the middle of Next Fest. Downloads and launching games still worked, but you couldn't get to the store to find new demos, and Valve didn't give a reason (GamesRadar).
What should you do if Steam is stuck on Loading User Data?
If the Steam store loads in your browser but the client is stuck on Loading User Data, it's Steam, not you. My advice: go outside, touch grass, do something else. Clearly Valve aren't putting the money they get from their 30% cut of games into making sure their servers don't go down.
Valve takes 30% of a game's Steam sales up to $10 million, 25% between $10 million and $50 million, and 20% above that (TechCrunch).
The Steam outage on 26 October, at a glance
| What you see | The client stuck on "Loading User Data" after signing in |
|---|---|
| First reports | Around 9am GMT, with a bigger jump around 11am GMT |
| Store and community | Still load in a web browser |
| What times out | The client's request for app and package info, every 2 minutes |
| Valve statement | None at 2:26pm GMT |
| Back for me | 1:42pm GMT, when my client loaded my library |
| Next Fest | Ends at 10am Pacific, 5pm GMT, on 26 October |
| Earlier this week | The Steam store went down on 21 October, error E502 L2 |
