The hotly anticipated 2019 Steam Summer Sale appears to have crashed the Steam Store’s servers for at least 30 minutes at launch and at other times since, giving users who attempt to visit the main store page a Steam 502 Bad Gateway error. Other pages on the site have been up and running for most of the time since the sale began, including store pages for individual games, though the entire site seems to have gone down for a few minutes at least once.
The sale seems to have launched shortly before 1 p.m. ET on June 25. Twitter user Wario64, who regularly tweets out video game deals, apparently captured a screenshot of the store page before it crashed. Publishers and developers also began tweeting links to their own games around the same time as Wario64’s tweet, announcing the Steam Summer Sale’s arrival. When we initially attempted to visit the site shortly after Wario64’s tweet, we were greeted with the 502 error and were not able to load the main page until after 1:30 p.m. ET. The official Steam Twitter account tweeted an announcement of the sale at 1:32 p.m. ET.
According to the Steam Store main page (which is sporadically up and running), the Steam Summer Sale (dubbed the “Steam Grand Prix”) runs from June 25 until July 9. The sale’s current featured deals are Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Astroneer, and Devil May Cry 5 at 50% off, 25% off, and 34% off respectively. Other games with deals featured on the page include Prey, Obsidian’s Tyranny, Slime Rancher, VR game Moss, and the PC port of Chrono Trigger.
As reported earlier by GameSpot, the dates of the sale were leaked back in May by Twitter user Steam Database, who reported that the sale would launch today and last for two weeks. As GameSpot points out, the recent addition of the Epic Games Store to the online video game store market means Steam has even more incentive than usual to make their legendary Summer Sale attractive to users’ wallets.
It’s possible that high traffic to the site due to the sale caused the crashes. We’ll keep you updated if any more major crashes occur.
