Steam users across the Middle East have been cut off from their cloud saves for weeks. Some of them are not getting that data back, and Valve has essentially said so, telling affected players through support chat that the timeline for any fix “remains unclear.”
The problem traces back to the US-Iran conflict that began on 28 February, when American and Israeli forces launched a bombing campaign against Iran. What followed was two months of escalation, Iranian strikes on Gulf infrastructure, the Strait of Hormuz closing and reopening repeatedly, oil markets in chaos. Somewhere in all of that, the third-party data centres Valve uses to run cloud storage across the region took damage. Valve’s own servers are fine. The buildings that housed the regional backups are not.
Valve says it keeps copies across multiple sites, so most users should be able to recover their saves once the infrastructure comes back. But enough facilities were hit that a portion of users are being told their data is simply gone. No timeframe, no guarantee, no particularly satisfying explanation beyond the fact that a war got in the way.
Steam isn’t the only one. Battlefield 6 players in the region have been complaining about server access, too and other multiplayer titles have had similar reports surface on social media. Nobody else has confirmed data loss yet, but the pattern is the same across the board.
The conflict has left its mark on the industry in other ways. In March, the White House tweeted a video promoting the Iran campaign cut together with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 footage, which was deleted after people noticed and said something about it. GDC 2026 had its worst attendance in years, with organisers pointing partly at the war and partly at the general state of American foreign policy, making international travel feel less straightforward than it used to be.
As of late April, the US and Iran are still deadlocked over the Strait of Hormuz. Nothing suggests that changes will come soon, which means the data centre situation in the Gulf stays exactly as it is, and Valve’s support team keeps sending the same message about timelines being unclear.
