Valve GameNetworkingSockets Outage Isolates Middle East P2P Play for Two Months

A GitHub issue opened on ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets reports that Steam's core P2P layer has produced 120 ms ping between Israeli players since 13 March while cross-play routes to PS5 remain at 5-10 ms. The report documents identical symptoms across multiple ISPs and notes parallel complaints from Egypt, confirming the problem is confined to Steam Networking rather than local networks or non-Steam titles such as Tekken 8. Primary evidence is limited to user-submitted latency traces and the absence of any Valve relay acknowledgment.

No public Steam status page or partner update references the relay degradation; Valve's own Steamworks documentation on GameNetworkingSockets (v1.4+) continues to list global anycast endpoints without regional failover notes. Cross-reference with prior relay incidents logged in issue 312 shows repeated Middle-East path asymmetry, a pattern absent from contemporaneous coverage that focused only on European and North-American routes.

The two-month duration exceeds typical transient peering flaps and aligns with Valve's documented shift toward fewer physical relay sites after 2022, leaving single points of failure for traffic originating in Israel and neighboring states. Street Fighter 6's working PSN path further isolates the fault to Steam's UDP relay mesh rather than game code or ISP policy.