More than two months after a caching glitch accidentally revealed private user information on Steam, Valve Corp has finally sent out a notification to users informing them of the breach and apologizing for it.

The breach occurred on Christmas Day during the game-buying frenzy that is the Steam Holiday Sale. According to a statement released by Valve shortly after the incident, the issue involved a caching error that was caused by a denial of service attack on the Steam servers.

Here’s how Valve explained the error at the time:

In response to this specific attack, caching rules managed by a Steam web caching partner were deployed in order to both minimize the impact on Steam Store servers and continue to route legitimate user traffic. During the second wave of this attack, a second caching configuration was deployed that incorrectly cached web traffic for authenticated users. This configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store responses which were generated for other users. Incorrect Store responses varied from users seeing the front page of the Store displayed in the wrong language, to seeing the account page of another user.

We’re sorry

It has been more than two months since Valve’s last update regarding the breach, but now it seems that the company has finally started directly notifying the users who may have been affected by the breach.

“We are contacting you because an IP address previously used by your account to access Steam made a web page request as described above,” Valve said in its email (via Kotaku). “Because IP addresses are commonly shared for home networks, mobile devices and by internet providers, we are unable to verify that your account was actually the one that made this request. For example one affected IP address was previously used by over 1,700 Steam accounts. Consequently we are notifying all users who have previously used this IP address.”

“This event did not make it possible to compromise your Steam account or make a fraudulent transaction from your account, but we want you to be aware of what information could have been seen by another Steam user.”

“We’re sorry this happened and have taken steps to prevent this problem from occurring in the future.”

Image courtesy of Valve Corp