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Seeing Other People's Steam Accounts: The Christmas Caching Catastrophe

2015-12-26

[public] 2.04M views, 62.2K likes, 623 dislikes audio only

channel thumbTom Scott

On Christmas Day, someone at Steam changed a setting and brought down their whole games platform. I wasn't expecting to do a video this Christmas, but when enough people tweet me, it turns out I can be convinced...

(I should note: while Steam have officially confirmed "a caching problem", I've got no privileged information about the specifics. It's possible (but unlikely, I think) this was a misconfiguration at Akamai, or a bizarre server bug that happened to exactly match a much more likely caching misconfiguration error!)


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