Valve’s popular PC gaming client, Steam, experienced a glitch Friday that left accounts vulnerable for roughly an hour. The issue is fixed, technically speaking, but Valve has stayed silent on what happened and what users should know about their account security. This has led to a very unhappy user base. On Friday afternoon, Steam suffered from a technical glitch that “Kotaku” has coined the “Steam Winter Fail.” The Fail occurred because of a configuration change earlier that day. The change led to a caching issue that in turn led to each user being logged into a random account that was not his or her own. If a user went to Steam during the glitch’s short lifespan, he or she would see all the cached account info for one random user. This included everything from items in the cart to the last four digits of that person’s credit card. In short, all the personal info that the user had on his or her account was available to other random users. Valve fixed the problem and issued a statement explaining what went wrong. In its note, the company said that there did not appear to be any unauthorized actions made on accounts and that users are not required to make any changes to their accounts or passwords. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough. People all across the world want to know what happened, why and what Valve is doing to prevent it from happening again. For many people, simply saying, “no additional action is required by users,” doesn’t suffice. Valve has not issued an email—not even a basic one—to its users. The only comment it had made on the Steam Winter Fail is the statement to the press. Users who haven’t checked gaming news sites are being left in the dark on a very important topic. Some don’t even know that their data was made available to the world. And the general consensus appears to be that if there was any chance strangers could have access to others’ addresses, credit card info or PayPal info, Valve needs to inform users what the situation truly is. This would need to be a statement much more detailed than the short one published. Even worse, it appears that Valve’s customer support is only giving cut-and-paste answers to questions when people approach it. Below is one conversation between a concerned user and Valve’s customer service. It has been floating around on various news sites and other platforms in the aftermath of the Steam Winter Fail. It sums up what a lot of people are experiencing and are concerned about: personal info is nothing to take lightly. The Steam subreddit has blown up due to the issue as well. One front-page thread on r/Steam is a discussion about the glitch with over 1000 comments and 4000 upvotes as of the time of writing. It’s title? We shouldn’t be okay with the fact that Valve still haven’t apologized for the cache server fiasco. Readers may be thinking “but Valve said nothing really happened. No fraudulent purchases were made, and the problem is solved. The company issued a statement saying as much. So what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that this isn’t the first time Valve has done a poor job of communicating issues with users. In fact, in a “Kotaku” article from October, Valve business development authority Erik Johnson said it out loud: Valve’s customer support isn’t good. We think customers are right. When they say our support’s bad, our initial reaction isn’t to say, ‘No, it’s actually good. Look at all of this.’ It’s to say that, no, they’re probably right, because they usually are when it comes to this kind of thing. We hear those complaints, and that’s gonna be a big focus for us throughout the year. We have a lot of work to do there. We have to do better. Whenever personal and private information is made public, the company at fault needs to step up and make sure that everyone involved has been informed about the issue. Even though the information in the Winter Steam Fail was cached, there is still the potential for fraud, and that’s something nobody wants to deal with. Valve needs to step up its game and let its users know—me included—what’s going on with their accounts. That is hardly an option: it’s a duty to customers when it comes to security and identity fraud.
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