Spotify Back After Brief Outage

The music streaming service Spotify was down temporarily on Sunday (Sept. 29), leaving thousands of listeners without access to tunes and podcasts earlier in the day.

More than 40,000 people reported outages with the music platform on downdetector.com, a website that allows users to report problems with popular apps and services. The highest amount of reported outages came in just after 12 p.m. ET. As of 5 p.m. ET, the number of outages reported on the website dropped to 351.

Spotify wrote on X Sunday afternoon, “We’re aware of some issues right now and are checking them out!”

Responding to the post, Spotify users complained about the outage disrupting workout routines and plans to stream a playlist at a child’s birthday party.

About an hour later, the streaming service posted that everything was looking much better. The app appeared to be working normally.

Millions of people use Spotify, which was the largest streaming service in 2023. The music platform reports having more than 626 million users, with 246 million subscribers.

According to MusicWatch, Billboard recently reported, Spotify ranks behind only Amazon Prime in terms of subscriber passion. When the economy gets rough, Spotify users are relatively unlikely to cancel their plans.   

Last week, Spotify announced The Weeknd has the most songs — a total of 18 — to hit 1 billion streams on Spotify, as of Sept. 24.

The Weeknd broke a 17-song tie with Drake with the title track of his fourth studio album, After Hours. Meawhile, the set’s Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 “Blinding Lights” was revealed to be the most streamed song on Spotify, with nearly 4.5 billion streams.