Holiday traffic spikes hit store access and logins
Steam access looked shaky during the holiday rush, but reports suggest things have largely stabilized again (for now). Attention then shifted to Epic, where users reported login problems affecting Epic Online Services and games that rely on it.
If you’re following our Indie Game Showcase 2025 hub, this kind of timing can derail downloads, updates, and first-time play sessions when traffic is at its highest.
What we know about Steam
Reports pointed to Steam store/community instability around Christmas Eve, including interruptions and “websocket errors” affecting parts of Steam’s web systems. Recent checks show core services looking normal again.
Epic: login issues acknowledged on the official status page
Epic’s public status page logged an incident for Epic Online Services login issues on December 25, with updates describing intermittent problems and recovery/monitoring. The same page listed no incidents reported for December 26 at the time of writing.
Outage trackers like Downdetector also showed activity around Epic services — useful as a signal, but not a confirmed root-cause on its own.
It wasn’t just gaming: other services saw report spikes too
Downdetector posts also flagged user-report spikes for services like Reddit, Prime Video, ARC Raiders, Crunchyroll, and Paramount+. That doesn’t prove one shared cause — but it shows how quickly the web can feel unstable during peak demand.
Epic Games Store branding
Quick fixes: what to do if you can’t log in or load store pages
- Check official status first: Epic’s status page is the fastest “confirmed” signal for Epic services.
- Check Steam status trackers: Steamstat is useful for at-a-glance service health.
- Don’t spam retries: if login/session services are overloaded, repeated attempts can make things worse. Wait a few minutes, then try again.
We’ll update if Valve or Epic publish a clearer postmortem — because this week proved “back to normal” can be temporary.
Written by Ronny Fiksdahl, Founder & Editor of Fix Gaming Channel.
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