About half an hour ago, I logged off my work computer and went to my living room, where we’ve got a PC setup attached to a TV so we can play our Steam games on a Good Screen instead of a Bad Screen. I was going to boot up some Fields of Mistria and continue trying to save March from remaining a total asshole all his life. But I kept getting an error saying that Steam couldn’t connect to the cloud to get my save out, and when I checked my connection, Steam seemed to not be connecting at all.
Was Steam down? I checked. SteamDB and DownDetector seemed to think so. I poked my head into the Steam subreddit, where a bunch of similarly confused people wanted to know what was going on. Fortunately, some experts were there to help us.
Apparently, Steam just does this on Tuesdays.
Steam has maintenance on Tuesdays! Did you know? I didn’t. It doesn’t seem to be published anywhere official. But it does seem to be an accepted fact among the community, reported on in past years and shared widely among PC gaming enthusiasts. Apparently, according to numerous users and posts going back several years, Steam typically goes down for maintenance for about 10-30 minutes on some (not all) Tuesday evenings, usually in the vicinity of 6 p.m. – 9 p.m. ET. I guess I have just somehow never noticed it doing this because I don’t normally rush to my PC to play video games immediately after work on Tuesdays. You’d think I’d have done that before, but life is a complex tapestry and I guess I was doing something else.
Here’s a handy flow chart for future reference:
Hope that helps!
As I’ve written this piece, Steam has come back up, which the flowchart tells me means this was just normal Tuesday maintenance, meaning I should now go play video games.
