It’s Friday night in the US, and for a while there, the music was not playing on Spotify for many people. Users reported streams suddenly stopped, and for people who’ve logged out, some say they can’t log in again.
The outage has garnered over 30,000 reports on DownDetector.com, starting just before 8PM ET and rising sharply since then. A status page for the company’s web API indicates a “minor” partial outage affecting only the player itself, which is consistent with what we’re seeing — but that’s also the most important part of Spotify.
The Spotify Status Twitter account acknowledged the issues just before 9PM ET, tweeting, “we’re looking into it,” and eventually followed up at 11:16PM ET with a post saying things “are looking much better now.”
The last time we noted this kind of service-wide outage for Spotify, a Google Cloud problem was the culprit, but so far, there’s no indication of a larger cloud or routing issue that might have impacted other services.
If you still can’t stream your music, you may have to pass the aux cord to someone who doesn’t have a Spotify subscription (they’ll be easy to identify, they’re the only ones who didn’t post a Spotify Wrapped image on social media a few weeks ago), or do something as archaic as relying on downloaded MP3s or some sort of physical media.
Update 11:25PM ET: Updated with Spotify’s message that service appears to have been restored.
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Richard Lawler