Merry Christmas, Here Is An Akamai Error: Steam Is Broken And The CDN Is To Blame
It is December 24th. You have your hot cocoa, your new games are ready to install, and you are ready to ignore your extended family for a solid six hours.
Then you click the Steam icon and get hit with a white screen full of gibberish. Merry Christmas, you filthy animal.
Steam is currently down, and honestly, the timing could not be worse. Reports started flooding in around 1:00 PM ET today that the storefront was completely unresponsive. But if you look closely at the error message you are likely seeing, that ugly white page with "Reference #18" followed by a string of random numbers, you will realize this isn't a standard crash. It is an Akamai (edgesuite.net) CDN error.
It Is Not Valve, It Is The Delivery Guy
For those who don't speak nerd, Steam uses Akamai, a massive global content-delivery network, to load its Store. Think of Valve as the restaurant and Akamai as the DoorDash driver. Right now, the restaurant is open and cooking, but the driver has driven his car into a ditch.
The specific error suggests that the request is being denied on Akamai's side before it even reaches Valve's servers. While Akamai's own status page claims all services are operational, because of course it does, the evidence on our screens says otherwise. The "edge" servers that are supposed to deliver the store content to you are refusing to do their job.
Pour One Out For The Engineers
While we are all annoyed that we can't buy Arc Raiders skins or browse the Winter Sale, spare a thought for the poor souls working the holiday shift.
It is Christmas Eve. These engineers at both Valve and Akamai likely just wanted to clock out, go home to their families, and eat some ham. Instead, they are currently in a server room somewhere desperately trying to reroute traffic while their phones blow up with angry notifications. It is a nightmare scenario for any IT professional.
My Take
This happens almost every year, yet it never gets less annoying. Hopefully, someone is paying these engineers double overtime for fixing this mess on a holiday. Until the CDN stabilizes and Akamai stops blocking our requests, maybe go talk to your family. Or just stare at your library and play something offline. We will update you when the lights come back on.