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birB Jan 19 @ 3:42pm

Account Unavailable - appearing as question mark in friends list.

Hi,
My friends account has recently been weirdly made unavailable by seemingly Steam itself. Looking at the friends list is appears as a question mark and is unavailable once clicked on.

Stranger still, now an again, it will recover and show the account profile with everything, but then shortly after reverts to unavailable. The user is unable to contact steam support, unable to recover account, unable to login or anything. The account is not taken over by a scammer or anything.

What can we do to recover the account? I am trying to raise a support ticket, or get the to get a support ticket made from using the "Help me recover my account" but it just shows an error and won't give any further information on contacting steam. No actions against TOS have been made.

Why is this happening? Is steam investigating the account or something?
There are many games and many hours put into this account. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Update: This may be a steam server issue as said by a clever person down-below.
However to contact steam support do the following:

Go to "I've forgot my password" on steam help page. Enter your details (of an available steam account), on the next two pages say I no longer have access to email or phone number. This will take you to a form to fill out. Fill this out with your friends (unavailable) details as much as possible and then give further information in the text box. Best of luck to everyone.

Last edited by birB; Jan 19 @ 8:02pm

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Showing 1-11 of 11 comments

birB Jan 19 @ 3:49pm

Furthermore, following https://help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/HelpWithLoginInfo?issueid=406 and selecting the "I forgot steam account name or password" and typing the email associated with the account presents the user with "An error occurred while searching for an associated account. Please try again."

Another user in another thread said they managed to raise a support ticket through another account to get the account in question recovered, and I am trying my best to - however I am not finding any options for me to get through to steam :(

Viejo Peruano Jan 19 @ 3:59pm

I have a friend that is having the same issue

pv2b Jan 19 @ 4:07pm

Glad to know we're not alone with this issue. My wife's having the same problem on her account, she's unable to login to Steam either on the web or on her web site, says something about a temporary error, and I get "Failed loading profile data, please try again later" trying to view her profile.

If I'm going to make a wild guess, it's possible there's an issue with a small group of Steam profiles on the moment, possibly if Steam uses something like database sharding to split profile data over multiple servers, if one of those servers is broken that would mean the profile data for anyone on that server is inaccessible.

Of course that doesn't help us to solve this issue, only Steam's technical department can fix whatever's wrong.

I can log in fine on her computer, she can't log onto other devices, and in Steam Guard sometimes her username shows up as as bunch of numbers.

And of course she's unable to contact Steam too, because the only way to contact Steam is to log in first. Great system

Last edited by pv2b; Jan 19 @ 4:08pm

birB Jan 19 @ 4:10pm

Originally posted by Viejo Peruano:
I have a friend that is having the same issue

Bro, I've managed to find a way to get the support ticket page up so you can help your friend fill in his details and hopefully have the account recovered. We are in the process.

Go to "I've forgot my password" on steam help page. Enter your details (steamname), on the next two pages say I no longer have access to email or phone number. Will take you to a form to fill out. Fill this out with your friends details as much as possible and then give further information in the text box.

Best of luck :thumbsup:

Viejo Peruano Jan 19 @ 4:19pm

Originally posted by birB:
Originally posted by Viejo Peruano:
I have a friend that is having the same issue

Bro, I've managed to find a way to get the support ticket page up so you can help your friend fill in his details and hopefully have the account recovered. We are in the process.

Go to "I've forgot my password" on steam help page. Enter your details (steamname), on the next two pages say I no longer have access to email or phone number. Will take you to a form to fill out. Fill this out with your friends details as much as possible and then give further information in the text box.

Best of luck :thumbsup:

ohh thanks, I'd let him know :)

birB Jan 19 @ 4:21pm

Originally posted by pv2b:
Glad to know we're not alone with this issue. My wife's having the same problem on her account, she's unable to login to Steam either on the web or on her web site, says something about a temporary error, and I get "Failed loading profile data, please try again later" trying to view her profile.

If I'm going to make a wild guess, it's possible there's an issue with a small group of Steam profiles on the moment, possibly if Steam uses something like database sharding to split profile data over multiple servers, if one of those servers is broken that would mean the profile data for anyone on that server is inaccessible.

Of course that doesn't help us to solve this issue, only Steam's technical department can fix whatever's wrong.

I can log in fine on her computer, she can't log onto other devices, and in Steam Guard sometimes her username shows up as as bunch of numbers.

And of course she's unable to contact Steam too, because the only way to contact Steam is to log in first. Great system

Sound right man, good you have some technical knowledge. Because it's not isolated you probably 100% correct and explains the intermittent available-ness.