Something went wrong with Spotify this morning, leading to a widespread outage of the streaming service that impacted its desktop and mobile apps, as well as its web player, on a global scale for several hours. According to the company, the issues were not due to a security breach.
The platform appears to be returning online in all regions following the disruption, with a company spokesperson saying “as of 11:45 a.m. ET, Spotify is back up and functioning normally.”
The outage officially began at 6:20 a.m. ET, the company acknowledged. Downdetector, which tracks such service disruptions, reported a significant spike in outages at around 8:45 a.m. ET, with nearly 49,000 reports peaking an hour later. It was down to 9,000 reports at 11:19 a.m. and roughly 2,000 by noon. ThousandEyes, which also monitors outages, mapped Spotify blips all morning across all continents except Antarctica.
Users on social media said they could still play downloaded music — or whatever they were listening to at the time of the outage — but could not search or view artists on the app or stream music.
“We are aware of the outage and working to resolve it as soon as possible,” a Spotify spokesperson told Billboard early Wednesday. “The reports of this being a security hack are completely inaccurate.”
How big is Spotify? It added 35 million new monthly active users in the fourth quarter of last year alone, bringing the total to 675 million. Premium subscribers reached 263 million, an 11% increase from the previous year, while ad-supported subscribers rose by 12% to 425 million.
Most subscribers are in Europe, North America and Latin America.
