Something breaks, reliably, for about an hour every Tuesday evening. Not confirmed by Bulkhead, not mentioned on Steam, not something either studio has been asked about publicly yet — but it shows up clearly in this site's own numbers, twice in a row, at the same hour, on the same day of the week.
What our own data shows
On Tuesday 15 September, traffic to this site's error and status pages jumped from a normal
few-hundred-sessions-an-hour baseline to 3,661 sessions in the 6–7pm ET hour alone — almost all of
it organic search landing on /errors/unexpected-error/ and
/status/. The hour before and the hour after were unremarkable.
It happened again on Tuesday 22 September, same hour: /status/ went from roughly 20–40 pageviews
an hour all day to 1,315 in that one hour, and /errors/unexpected-error/ went from a handful to
439. We watched it happen in real time — the live comment feed on /status/ filled with reports
in the space of about fifteen minutes:
"Steam is down"
"Steam Server Paris (par1) is down. If you were connected to par1, close steam completely, relaunch it and you might get connected to another server."
"an unexpected error has occurred. error code 1413677057"
Eleven separate reports of code 1413677057 landed inside that same fifteen-minute window — the exact code this site already tracks as an online-services failure at load, not an install problem.
An independent Steam monitor logged an incident at the same minute
This is the strongest piece of evidence here, and it's not ours. Steam Dashboard (steamdb.com, an independent Steam status monitor, not to be confused with SteamDB) — independent of WARDOGS, independent of this site — logged a real incident recovering at 22:02 UTC on 15 September 2026, described in its own history as "recovered after 16 min (client, community, webapi)." Convert that: 22:02 UTC is 18:02 ET, inside the same hour our traffic spiked in, on the same day. That is a third party's own instrumentation, not a guess from timing alone, and it's the one piece of this page that comes closest to Confirmed rather than Reported.
22 September is the honest gap. Steam Dashboard's history shows no logged incident that day — nothing recovering, nothing flagged — despite our own traffic spike being larger than the 15th's and despite the live "Steam is down" reports quoted above. Either Steam Dashboard's detection threshold didn't trip that day for a disruption that was still real for WARDOGS specifically, or the two Tuesdays don't share quite the same cause. We're not papering over that: one Tuesday has independent, timestamped third-party confirmation: the other doesn't, yet.
Why this probably isn't a WARDOGS problem
The timing is the tell, on the 15th especially. 6pm Eastern is 3pm Pacific, which sits inside — or right at the edge of — the window Steam is commonly described as running weekly maintenance in. Third-party trackers don't even agree with each other on the exact hour: one source puts it at 1–3pm Pacific, another at "around 4:00pm Pacific, roughly 00:00 UTC Wednesday," with 15–30 minutes the commonly cited duration and an explicit note that "start times can vary slightly." Valve has never published an exact time, and the disagreement between trackers is itself evidence of that — our own ~6pm ET reading doesn't land precisely inside anyone else's stated window either, though it isn't far outside it. That maintenance affects Steam's own backend services — login, the store, matchmaking, game coordinators — across many games simultaneously, not any one title's servers. A game that authenticates through Steam at load, the way WARDOGS does, would show exactly this shape of failure: a short, sharp spike in "the online services didn't answer" errors, clustered in one window, clearing on its own once Steam's maintenance ends.
None of this is confirmed by Bulkhead or Team17 — neither has named Steam maintenance as the cause of these Tuesday spikes. What's genuinely stronger than a guess is the Steam Dashboard incident log for 15 September specifically; everything about the general weekly pattern and the 22 September spike is still our own read, not an official explanation, and flagged that way on purpose.
What we still don't know
Two Tuesdays is a pattern worth publishing, not a law. We don't know if it repeats every week, and we don't know why 22 September produced a bigger spike in our own numbers than 15 September while Steam Dashboard's log has an incident for the first day and nothing for the second — that asymmetry is unresolved, not explained away. We'll keep watching and update this page, including the Steam Dashboard check, the next time Tuesday evening comes around.
What to do if it happens to you
Wait it out rather than reinstalling. If you're seeing 1413677057 or a flat "Steam is down" on a Tuesday evening, the error page and the live status feed are the fastest way to confirm it's not just you — and on both Tuesdays we've tracked, it cleared inside the hour without anyone needing to do anything to their install.
