The intense wind and rain that knocked out power to over a million homes and business in the Pacific Northwest seems to have claimed another familiar victim, Valve's digital distribution service Steam.

Gamers are reporting widespread problems connecting to the platform, the Steam forums, and game servers, rendering many Steam-dependent games and tools useless. After learning of the issue this morning, I attempted to play a quick round of Counter-Strike Source, only to find no game servers available. Attempts to play Half-Life DM and Day of Defeat Source yielded only marginally better results, three total games currently running for each title. I was able to connect to at least one of the Steam content servers, allowing me to download the recently released Zen of Sudoku demo.

The Bellevue, Washington based company is located about ten miles east of the city of Seattle. No word on when we can expect to resume team-flashing eachother. Let's hope that backup systems will be in place to prevent an outage like this in the future so gamers and developers worldwide aren't also left in the dark. Michael McWhertor

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