Spotify Service Suffers Worldwide Outage

Music streaming giant Spotify has suffered a rare outage that left users around the world unable to enjoy music playback.

The problems began on 1pm BST (British summer time) on Wednesday, and in many cases users were only able to play a few seconds of a song before getting an error message.

The problem did not affect those users who had downloaded songs to their devices, suggesting the problem was with the streaming service itself.

Service outage

The outage for the 300 million Spotify users around the world lasted 90 minutes, before being fixed.

“We’re aware of some issues right now and are checking them out! We’ll keep you posted,” Spotify said.

“Good news! Everything is good to go and looking happy. Still having issues? Give @SpotifyCares a tweet,” it added a short time later.

The music streaming giant did not explain what caused the issue.

However, it is thought that the problem could be down to Spotify forgetting to renew its TLS certificate.

A Cloudflare engineer called Louis noticed that an important Spotify certificate had expired, and the service returned minutes after this certificate was renewed again.

Rare outages

Outages for Spotify are rare.

In 2016 Spotify, along with Twitter and Reddit suffered outages, mainly on the US East Coast, following a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the domain name servers (DNS) covering the New Hampshire region.

And then in July this year, Facebook was forced to apologise for a code change that led to dozens of popular iOS and iPad apps such as Spotify, Pinterest and Tinder becoming unusable for several hours.

In February 2016, Spotify moved its back-end infrastructure onto the Google Cloud Platform, after years of hosting its service in its own data centre facilities.