After Steam has officially launched its annual Winter Sale, a huge number of gamers were heading into the online store grabbing their favorite game titles. However, it was recently reported that Valve's Steam Network went down in the middle of the sale. As a result, gamers were unable to purchase new games nor access its other features.

According to the report from Game Rant, it seems it is an unfortunate scenario for gamers who are hoping to take advantage of this huge sale by the company. As of the moment, it was reported that gamers were unable to access the Steam's Store or their friends' list. In addition, all Steam game servers are down as well. Meanwhile, Valve has yet to issue an official statement regarding this current issue. That means its cause still remains unclear to the players.

Based on the report, one possible reason for the crashed servers is the increased traffic for Winter Sale which has officially started yesterday. However, this is not the first time for the Steam services to go offline or restricted by one of the company's sales, which are known for bringing massive discounts on comparatively new releases.

As reported, gamers rush to Steam in order to take advantage of the discount that will cause an increase in the traffic and sometimes overloads it. Aside from the overload traffic, another possible reason for the server crash are the DDoS attacks which had also plagued several gaming services like Xbox One Live, PlayStation Network and even Steam itself throughout the holiday season.

Meanwhile, it will be interesting enough to know if other online gaming services will be down as well. If both Xbox One Live and PlayStation Store are also down, it would be a strong indication that another DDoS attack has been launched. However, recent reports said that Steam services seems to be back online.