No Hollow Knight: Silksong phenomenon on 7 Oct, but was it coincidence that Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Riot, and Epic all went down at the same time?
First, Steam blinked out. Then, Xbox, PlayStation, Riot Games, and Epic Games followed suit. Within the hour, what looked like routine maintenance turned into a cross-platform blackout that had players asking the same question: was this just coincidence… or something far more coordinated?
Steam goes down, followed by widespread outages
Steam briefly went offline on 6 October at around 11:00 PM ET (7 October 11:00 AM SGT), with users suddenly reporting issues logging in and connecting to servers, and reported by Down Detector. What began as a short-lived interruption soon appeared to spread beyond Valve’s platform.
Within minutes, outage reports surged on Downdetector for Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Epic Games Store, League of Legends, Valorant, and Fortnite. The near-simultaneous timing across services prompted speculation that the incidents were linked.
Riot acknowledges network instability
At roughly the same time, Riot Games confirmed “game disconnection issues.” In a statement provided to media, Riot Games spokesperson Joe Hixson confirmed that the company had been dealing with intermittent network issues for more than 36 hours but did not speculate on the cause.
“Like many companies over the last day or two, we’ve faced challenges to network stability and taken proactive steps to protect the player experience,” Hixson said. “We’ve temporarily disabled ranked queues in some regions and enabled ranked points loss compensation where appropriate.”
As of publication, Valve, Microsoft, and Sony have not commented publicly on the cause of their respective service interruptions.
Social media speculation points to possible DDoS activity
As platforms began recovering, posts surfaced on Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) suggesting that the disruptions could be part of a DDoS attack affecting multiple gaming networks.
One widely shared post from security-tracking X account @vxdb claimed that both Steam and Riot Games were experiencing “large DDoS attacks,” referencing information from TCPShield about possible “TCP Carpet Bomb” activity.
While these claims have not been verified, their timing coincided with the outage spikes observed across several major platforms.
Aisuru Botnet mentioned in reports
Reports from cybersecurity outlets such as Cybernews and PCMag noted that some online discussions linked the outages to the Aisuru botnet, a massive network previously cited in Cloudflare’s September report on “hyper-volumetric” DDoS attacks, described as among the largest recorded to date.
However, there is currently no confirmed evidence connecting the Aisuru botnet to the 6 October incidents.
As of time of writing, Steam and the other affected platforms had returned to normal operation, however, the reason for the outages remains uncertain. Regardless of the cause, the brief downtime served as a reminder of how closely connected online gaming ecosystems are, and how quickly simultaneous outages can ripple across millions of players worldwide.
