Spotify suffers notable hour-long outage for many users

Breathe that weekend air, Saturday is here in most parts of the world! Great time to put on some music and relax, except, that is, if you’re a Spotify user because the world’s most popular streaming service is experiencing some issues right now.

Update: It looks like the service is returning for most users. Access to Spotify was problematic for around an hour, which makes this a notably long outage. Most users expect on-demand music so Spotify and its rivals can’t afford to let them down regularly.

Many of Spotify’s 100 million users — me included — found themselves logged out of the service, some while listening to music, and are unable to access Spotify’s mobile or desktop apps. So if you’re seeing notifications that suggest that your password is wrong, that you don’t have an account or that you can’t log in via Facebook, don’t worry as something isn’t working right and it is affecting a lot of other people, too.

This is a rare outage for Spotify, which recently passed 30 million paying users. The problem appeared to start around midnight PDT (8:00 GMT), according to user complaints on Twitter.

Spotify acknowledged the issue on Twitter and said it is working on a fix, although it didn’t say what the problem is and how many users it may be affecting. (We’ve contacted the company to try to get more information.)

Here are the error notices you may be seeing on Spotify’s desktop (left) and mobile (right) apps. The web client — play.spotify.com — also appears to inaccessible.

spotify 2

Those affected are, of course, upset, with some worried that their accounts have been wiped.

https://twitter.com/Joshb2k15/status/716161619999391748

Now might be a good time for Soundcloud, which just launched a premium version of its service, and Apple, which is now running advertising with Taylor Swift, to promote their services as alternatives to Spotify for a little spontaneous new user acquisition. Maybe Kanye can even pipe up — he did launch new releases on Spotify this week so he might want to take credit for bringing Spotify to its knees. (Though it is not the reason for today’s glitch, of course.)

Stay tuned for more…