Steam bug causing user account information to appear to other customers

Given this started happening in the past few minutes on Christmas Day, surely Half-Life developer Valve – Steam’s overlord – didn’t deploy a change over the festival weekend?

Steam is now experiencing a huge security breach which has allowed its users to randomly login into a random account and be able to access the account details and other information stored by the user, including their personal email and credit card information.

It is not clear at this stage whether Steam is suffering a major technical hitch or there is some malicious element to the flaw. I tried myself, and found I had access to another user’s account. Steam has been taken offline as of time of writing, but we still advise caution until the leak has been plugged for certain. Valve has since shut down the Store while the issue is investigated and resolved. For many who have linked their Paypal account, the first option seemed to be logging into Paypal and unlink the two, to hopefully avoid any false charges.

Steam’s community manager on Reddit has let users know that the team has been made aware of the issue.

Access from a web browser to the Steam website also results in an error.

Others have logged in and Steam is now in a different language for them altogether.