Steam, Riot Games, and others may have been hit with a DDoS attack earlier today that broke records

Earlier today, Steam and Riot Games appear to have been one of many targets of a massive DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. The latter posted an update to their website late yesterday saying the are “aware of a problem causing players to disconnect from their games and are investigating the problem,” initially spotted by Cybernews. Apparently, Riot also temporarily disabled ranked games while this issue was active, but that time appears to have passed. So, if you were noticing some problems with Steam earlier today, such as an E503 L1 error, this might have been part of the problem.

Massive DDoS attack might have been the culprit behind Steam issues earlier today, as well as other outages

The attack is suspected to come from the massive botnet Aisuru, which has reported record-breaking traffic during the outages. Thanks to data from Downdetector, and a screenshot from @cripto_lion on social media, we can get a sense of the larger scope of the outage. Steam appears to have been a target, along with plenty of other games and gaming services. From this post, we can see that services like PlayStation Network and EA went down around the same time as Steam, as well as reported problems with games like Marvel Rivals, Call of Duty, Palworld, Counter-Strike, Valorant, Deady by Daylight, Dota 2, and League of Legends.

A glimpse of the many outages that happened at the same time.Source: cripto_lion on X/Twitter

According to a social media post from @vxdb, Aisuru reached 29.69 Tbps (terabytes per second) today, which means it has broken the previous record of 22.2 Tbps which was set last month, thanks to Cybernews again for the context. This botnet was first discovered in 2024 and has continued to grow exponentially since then, so don’t expect this to be the last of these kinds of attacks.

Notice the major spike in traffic.Source: vxdb on X/Twitter

Overall, this is a concerning trend along with the lack of game ownership. You may recall earlier this year when the PlayStation Network went down for nearly 24 hours, causing many players, even those without a PSN subscription, to lose access to their games. With every passing day it’s becoming more and more apparent that purchasing the license to play a game is the way the industry is moving, and that makes customers increasingly reliant on services like Steam and PSN, which makes attacks like this more problematic.

For now, we will have to wait for more information on the situation. This isn’t a confirmed DDoS attack, it is still only suspected. But this would be quite the odd happenstance if these two things had nothing to do with each other.

• Steam
• PSN / PlayStation Network
• Riot Games
• DDoS