Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Why am I getting a CAPTCHA message without a CAPTCHA when I attempt to login to Steam?

Question

I've been unsuccessfully trying to login to Steam to take advantage of today's sale, and all I get is this lousy message:

Extremely unhelpful error message

"Please verify your humanity by re-entering the characters below."

What characters? Do they mean my password? I've triple-checked it, and it's correct. Was there supposed to be some captcha on the page? Has anyone ever had this problem?

I'm getting this message on the Store page of the Steam client.

Answer

If there's no CAPTCHA and you're getting this message, this is usually a (very poorly worded and completely unhelpful) error message indicating that the system is down for maintenance.

The Steam Downtime Annoucement thread on the Steam forums seems to confirm this is the likely culprit. If you go to the last page of that thread, it mentions some downtime today around this time.

Give it a little while, and then try to login again.

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