Steam Image Hosting Issues

I primarily use the integrated Picasa Web Album functionality as provided by Google through Blogger, and every now and again I use an alternative service if I suspect issues with the image quality (which has occurred in the past). Typically this means I will upload a screenshot through the Steam service, obtain a link and place it in a blog post and move on. In the past this seemed a tried and true practice as I had no issues until tonight when going through some material, I came across this post from 2013 in which all of the Steam hosted images were missing.

When checking Steam all of those images are still there, posted to the Steam cloud and the links provided still work (these can be checked by copying the link address and posting it into a web page address bar). When checking the post for the original link I came across this issue:

Original Post Image URL

http://cloud-3.steampowered.com/ugc/xxx

Current Image URL on Steam

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/xxx

Without any notice the beginning part of the URL's changed from “Steam Powered Cloud” to “Akamai”.

Akamai appears to be a cloud service provider that Steam perhaps has outsourced to, however I wonder if they (Steam) realize that they just broke every link that any one referred to in a blog post.

When a cow is a cow.

I am a big fan of Steam, but this is just bullshit.