While Xbox Live and PlayStation Network were experiencing technical difficulties over the holidays, Steam's holiday sale helped it break new records in the number of concurrent users.

Valve's digital games store and service broke the 8.4 million mark on January 1, and according to Steam's Game and Player Statistics page, it reached an all-time high yesterday at 11:10 a.m. with 8,500,245 concurrent users. That's a record for concurrent usage, up from 8,020,700 people back in June 2014.

The number of concurrent Steam users probably peaked during the holiday because people had more free time to play games, and the incentive to keep checking Steam every day because of its annual sale, which introduced new discounts every 12 hours.

The most popular game on Steam by far at the moment is Dota 2, as it usually is, with a peak of 879,827 players. It's followed by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which had 383,584 players, Team Fortress 2, which has 92,606, and then Football Manager 2015, which had 77,749 players.

In September, Valve announced that Steam has more than 100 million active accounts, which is up by 25 million from the 75 million figure announced in January 2013.