It is bad enough when Steam undergoes its usual holiday service hiccups (either due to high traffic or intentional DDOS attacks), but users were treated to an even more upsetting situation over the holiday weekend when a system error allowed a number of users to view personal information belonging to other accounts.

Steam owner Valve Corp acknowledged the issue with a brief statement.

“Steam is back up and running without any known issues,” a Valve spokesperson said in a statement to GameSpot. “As a result of a configuration change earlier today, a caching issue allowed some users to randomly see pages generated for other users for a period of less than an hour. This issue has since been resolved. We believe no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information and no additional action is required by users.”

While Valve is downplaying the incident, several users reported that before the error was fixed, they were able to view sensitive account information such as email addresses and purchase history, which, while not exactly earth shattering, is certainly more serious than Valve let on in its rather short statement.

Steam account theft on the rise

Valve has assured users that the issue was caused by a system error and was not the result of a security breach, but the incident has drawn more attention to the growing security concerns surrounding Steam.

Earlier this month, Valve corp admitted that Steam account theft is at an all time high, having increased “twenty-fold” since the introduction of Steam Trading, and the company said that account theft is the number one complaint of users.

“The ‘I got hacked’ story is told so frequently it’s become commonplace,” Valve said in a blog post earlier this month. “And that makes it easy to forget its significance; compromised security of email accounts and PCs, Steam account violation, and theft. We used to hold the opinion that if you were smart about account security, you’d be protected–it’s easy to assume that users whose accounts were stolen were new or technically naïve users who must be sharing their passwords or clicking on suspicious links.”

“That’s simply not the case.”