New Delhi, Dec. 17 -- Steam appeared to suffer a second major outage within 24 hours on Tuesday, December 16, as tens of thousands of users reported problems accessing the platform, according to Downdetector. The fresh disruption came less than a day after a widespread server failure on December 15 that left gamers unable to log in, load profiles or access community features.

By 3:30 pm PT, more than 41,000 users had flagged issues with Steam on Downdetector.com, a service that tracks outages using real-time user reports from multiple sources. The majority of complaints indicated server connection failures, suggesting renewed strain on Valve's backend infrastructure.

User reports surged rapidly on Tuesday afternoon, with gamers across s...