Spotify Recovers From Service-wide Outage; Here's What Happened

A temporary outage of the Spotify music streaming service in the US prevented a number of customers from accessing the live music platform.

On Friday, Jan. 13, several Spotify users claimed that streaming abruptly stopped after they checked out and could not re-login. However, Hindustan Times reports that the streaming platform has now been restored as of the latest update.

"Everything's looking much better now!" According to Spotify's latest update on Twitter.

What Happened During Spotify's Outage?

At the height of the outage, according to Downdetector, which records outages using a variety of sources, including user reports, there were over 45,000 affected users from the United States. Users have claimed that feeds have abruptly ceased, and some users who have checked out claim they are unable to re-login.

Additionally, more than 5,500 users in the UK reported problems with the platform. The streaming platform tweeted subscribers that it was investigating the situation as word of a hitch with Spotify spread on social media.

The Spotify Status Twitter account acknowledged the issues and eventually followed up with a post saying things "are looking much better now."

Over 30,000 reports of the outage have been made on DownDetector.com, with a notable increase in reports since just before 8 pm ET. Although the player itself is the most crucial component of Spotify, a status page for the company's online API indicates a "small" partial outage affecting only that.

Now, the number of reports of outages had dropped below 2,000 while Spotify was going back online.

Not the First Major Spotify Outage

According to The Verge, the last time that Spotify suffered a major outage was due to a Google Cloud issue that caused consumers to report this kind of service-wide outage for the music streaming app. However, no evidence has yet been found of a bigger cloud or routing problem that would have affected other services.

Standard reports that multiple services could fall offline on the same day, as was the case on March 8, 2022 when Spotify and Discord both had global outages for two hours. The 1.1 million users who reported an outage on the chat app dropped it to third place in the rankings. Additionally, that significant disruption narrowly edged out a WhatsApp breakdown that happened on October 25, 2022.

Similarly, the social gaming platform Roblox appears to have experienced the longest outage in 2022, as seen by surges in user reports that lasted all night. While Snapchat, which came in ninth, and Call of Duty, which came in seventh, both experienced four-hour outages in 2022.

Occasionally, issues with the internet infrastructure providers that support a substantial portion of the web might result in this kind of disruption. For instance, a late-year Amazon Web Services outage had an impact on platforms including Disney+, Slack, Twitch, and PlayStation Network.