Popular music streaming app Spotify stopped playing music for millions of people around the globe on Saturday morning. Tens of thousands of people reported that their streams abruptly stopped and many were unable to log in.
DownDetector collected over 30,000 reports just before 6 AM PKT with a surge right after that time. Spotify’s status page that reports outages for the company’s web API indicated a “minor” partial disruption which only affected the music player and nothing else. But that also happens to be the most critical part of Spotify.
An hour later, Spotify acknowledged the issue via its ‘Spotify Status’ Twitter account and said that “we are looking into it”. Fast forward to 9 AM PKT, Spotify was successfully able to resolve the issue and tweeted that “Everything’s looking much better now”.
Everything’s looking much better now! Get in touch with @SpotifyCares if you still need help.
— Spotify Status (@SpotifyStatus) January 14, 2023
The last time Spotify faced such a disruption, it had to do with outages in Google Cloud services, which also caused problems for lots of other apps and services. This time, there have been no indications of routing issues or problems at a larger cloud-scale that might have hurt other services at the same time.
Spotify seems to be working just fine in Pakistan and there have been no reports over the past few hours on DownDetector. However, it is quite possible that some unlucky users might still be subject to the lingering effects of the outage, so you might have to rely on other apps instead.
Maybe it’s time you look at your YouTube playlist that hasn’t been touched in years.
Maybe it’s time to start listening to LPs, CDs, and downloaded music instead.