How long does Steam maintenance take? Steam maintenance schedule

It’s good to plan when to game and when to wait.

Image via Valve

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Steam is a platform used for gaming by millions of PC players globally. With all of that daily traffic, there are bound to be maintenance periods to fix different issues. Sometimes Steam’s servers have to be taken down for regular maintenance, updating, security checks, and other general issues. Other times, their servers can suddenly stop working, which signals that there is a malfunction or outage on their end that they need to fix. Let’s take a look at how long Steam maintenance periods usually last and how you can plan around that schedule.

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How long does Steam maintenance last

Scheduled maintenance on Steam doesn’t take more than one hour to complete. However, if the servers are down for an unscheduled reason, such as a malfunction, outage, or something else, then it can take much longer to bring them back up. For example, they could be experiencing hardware or network failures, which means more involved fixes need to take place before the servers are back up and running.

Steam maintenance schedule

With Steam’s offices operating on US Pacific Time, that means that they target the time with the lowest traffic to perform scheduled maintenance. According to the Steam Support page, the scheduled maintenance usually takes place on Tuesday, most often during the early morning or late afternoon in their time zone.

Why are Steam servers down?

Steam servers can be down due to scheduled maintenance or unforeseen problems with the servers. You can always check the server status of Steam servers and plan accordingly. Even if upgrades are deployed to the server, you might not immediately see the results, because they were meant to improve how they operate internally. At other times, you might notice a major improvement in performance, or even new features being added to Steam.