And there was a DoS attack involved. Seems that Steam and their "partners" werent able to deal with both the DoS and winter sale rush at the same time and mistakes were made due to the overwhelming presure. Anyway, a response to a DoS attack is what caused the whole thing.

"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."

What do you think? Was this an honest mistake or should we grab those pitchforks and torches?

Source 

*grabs pitchforks & torches*

There's absolutely no excuse for this ...

PSN gets DoS attacks occasionally but I've never seen them screwing up their caching configuration to compromise a user's data ...

Maybe start offering something similar to PS+ and XBL so they can use the resources to build a safer service.

You were geared before hand and you're geared now.

Yeah there was no excuse but it's happened and been dealt with just like how it took a week and longer for SOny to deal with their even bigger fiasco. I only wonder how long you'll keep on at Valve and not with Sony.

I believe the incident was a honest mistake, but the fact that Valve didn't warn Steam users during the incident and immediately gave a statement after the problems where fixed is simply ridiculous.

I work in IT and things like this happen all the time. You won't see it often because usually there are a lot of safeguards in place but it happens and is especially easy to happen in rushed scenarios like this.

The fault is still on them though and an honest mistake does not safe you from responsibility.

I still laugh at anybody who believes this could've been prevented with more money.

I could've used XBL instead of PSN as a reference but opted to use the latter as it has a known lowpoint when it comes to security just to show how much more pathetic Valve is ... 

Sony is not immune to criticism on my part but it's not like they've made a lot big mistake so far like the others this generation ... 

Well, in a way, we had it comming. We been preaching for so long about the undeniable truth that PC gaming is far superior. It was a matter of time before console gamers tried attacking the Masterace, at the slightlest sign of blood. But like you said, the PSN incident was way worse. And lets not forget the Red Ring of Dead , aka gamings biggest fiasco ever.

Valve doesn't do generations though, so how do we even go about "measuring" mistakes if you're going to let one of the hook via a gen gap and the other who doesn't do gens and just hold onto the hate.