My internet is doing fine, I can get to all manner of websites, and within the Steam client, I can navigate around to various store and community webpages. But Steam keeps launching immediately into offline mode and I can't chat with any of my Steam friends.

I can't find any mention of this on the Steam forums right now (maybe I'm just dense and missing it), so anybody else having this problem at the moment?

For the last few weeks, Steam always launches into offline mode when my computer first starts up, but I can go up to the menu and hit go online.

For me steam only launches in offline mode when i dont have an internet connection, maybe steam got blocked by a firewall somehow. If its just the chat that is launching offline then its either their community servers or something with your install. Or possibly some sort of chat probation? Its probably not that.

So when I hit "Go online", it would say "Steam needs to be restarted to try this", I'd click OK, then when Steam came back up, it would still be in offline mode.

But instead of going that route of restarting Steam, I just tried fully closing Steam the normal way, then opening it, and now I'm fully online. Weird.

@schreiberty: That makes sense because I have an SSD. My email and twitter checker complain about no connection too for a split second on startup. I should probably changed my IP to fixed but I so rarely restart my computer that it's really not a big deal.