If you’re a Steam user, you may have noticed the platform acting quite strangely on Christmas of this year. At the time, all we knew was users were able to see other user data via the Steam Store, which contained personal information, and that it appeared to be a caching issue.

Now, Valve has issued an official statement regarding the entire debacle.

It turns out to indeed be from a caching error, which is a typical response to what was actually happening – a pretty strong DDoS attack which resulted in a 2000% increase of traffic over their regular holiday numbers.

From their statement:

During the second wave of this attack, a second caching configuration was deployed that incorrectly cached web traffic for authenticated users. This configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store responses which were generated for other users. Incorrect Store responses varied from users seeing the front page of the Store displayed in the wrong language, to seeing the account page of another user.

According to Valve, roughly 34,000 users were affected from the caching issue. Once they identified the source of the problem, they shut down the Steam Store and reconfigured their cache.

For those affected by the error, Valve simply issued an apology:

We apologize to everyone whose personal information was exposed by this error, and for interruption of Steam Store service.

Were you affected by the Steam caching issue? If not, were you able to see other users’ data?