Steam Friends List Not Working: 4 Ways To Fix

Steam is a platform in which you can purchase all your favorite games and then play them on your PC through the said platform. It not only allows you to play said games, but it also allows you to interact with its community, read their reviews, etc. The platform allows players to collect secrets and achievements related to their favorite games as well, which is a neat feature.

Speaking of interacting with others, Steam has options that allow you to make friends on the platform and chat with them as well. You can learn all sorts of things about these friends through Steam. This includes all of the games that they like to play, what they’ve played recently or are currently playing at the time, what products they recommend, and much more of the sort.

It also plainly allows you to chat with them and form groups to play video games together whenever you feel like it. All of this can be done through the friends list on Steam, which is quite simple and usually works fine most of the time. But ever since the friends list was updated, it has been messing up occasionally. Here are some solutions to try in this situation.

How to Fix Steam Friends List Not Working?

1. Restart Steam and Your PC

Use the task manager on your computer to forcefully close all instances of Steam that are currently running on your PC. There are many cases in which doing so is all that’s needed to fix the issue. You can open the task manager by simultaneously pressing ctrl, alt, and delete on your keyboard. A menu will appear presenting you with a variety of options, out of which you only need to click the one that says ‘’Task Manager’’. Once you do so, the program will open.

Now just close all applications displayed in the Task Manager that are related to Steam. After you’ve done so, make sure to open Steam once again. If it still isn’t fixed, try to restart your PC and see if the friends list is working now. If this wasn’t enough to fix the issue, there are still some other solutions to try out.

2. Software Confliction

There are many cases in computers where one software tends to clash with the other, ultimately resulting in limited functionality for one of them or both. This tends to happen with Steam and antivirus programs. Lots of the features of the platform become faulty when you use antivirus software, which is why it is recommended that you disable it for the time being.

You should try to whitelist Steam from your firewall as well, as it could be preventing the application from working properly. Once you disable your antivirus and whitelist Steam from your computer’s firewall, try running it again and the friends list should work properly.

3. Clear Cache

The minor files stored by Steam itself are sometimes the culprits behind a good chunk of the problems that you face with the platform. This could be the case for the issues that you’re facing with the friends list as well. That’s why it’s recommended that you delete the cache files from your system and try to get the list to work again.

You have nothing to worry about as there’s no important detail in any of these cache files. You can easily delete this cache from the Steam client. Upon opening the client, go to the settings menu and then head on over to the download settings which should be in the said menu. In the downloads settings tab, you’ll be able to find an option to clear the cache from Steam. Do so and try to use the friends list again.

4. Revert to Old Version

As mentioned above, it was one of the updates made specifically to the friends list that started causing all these different problems that are occurring even today. Luckily, there is a simple solution that can be used to fix the issue in this case.

All you have to do is open up the properties of the Steam application by right-clicking on its icon. Now insert the words “-nochatui -nofriendsui” in the target of the application, exactly as they’re written, without the quotation marks. This should revert the friends list back to the previous version and fix the problem you’re facing.