On March 13, Israeli gamers began reporting a crippling lag in any title that relies on Steam Networking for peer‑to‑peer play. The glitch spikes latency to roughly 120 ms between players inside Israel, while connections to Europe stay at 60‑80 ms. The problem appears confined to the Israeli market, with no signs of it affecting other regions yet.

Street Fighter 6 illustrates the issue: Israeli PC players hit 120 ms against local rivals, yet achieve 60‑80 ms when facing European opponents. In contrast, cross‑play between a PC and a PS5 player records a flawless 5‑10 ms, proving the underlying network path to non‑Israeli nodes is healthy.

Community members have tried port forwarding and contacted several Israeli ISPs, finding no internal routing faults. Other games that do not use Steam Networking, such as Tekken 8, show normal performance, reinforcing that the problem targets Steam's P2P layer in that region.

Reports from Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries suggest the latency spike may be region‑wide, affecting dozens of players across multiple ISPs. Until Valve or the ISPs resolve the routing anomaly, gamers will face unplayable delays in any Steam‑based P2P title.