Spotify was down: what happened, when the music app returned, and more

If you’re listening to Spotify and have just been confronted with an ‘artist not found’ message or a broken search function, you’re not alone – a widespread outage has hit the world’s most popular music streaming app.

According to the website Down Detector, the outage hit Spotify at around 5.40am PT / 12.40pm GMT, with over 18,000 reports of issues in the US and almost 8,000 and counting in the UK.

Across social media sites like Twitter, Spotify users have voiced their frustrations of being left without their tunes on long train journeys and commutes. Spotify has also now officially acknowledged that there’s a problem and is “looking into it”.

Here’s everything we know so far about the Spotify outage and when it might be fixed…

(Image credit: Down Detector)

If you’re finding it difficult to play music on Spotify or generally use its app, you’re not alone – the website Down Detector is seeing a high number of reports from users from around the world that the streaming service isn’t working.

These reports are continuing to spike around the world, suggesting this isn’t a just an intermittent glitch. We’ll update this liveblog with any official news as soon as we hear back from OpenAI. 

Spotify has now acknowledged that there’s an issues with its streaming service, and that thousands of users weren’t just mis-typing their favorite artist into its search.

Its official Spotify Status account says that “something’s not quite right, and we’re looking into it”, but doesn’t give a timescale or a potential reason for the outage. 

We’ve dropped Spotify a line to find out more and will report back with any news. Until then, it’s over to YouTube and finger-drumming…

(Image credit: Twitter)

Spotify outage aren’t too common, but the streaming service did have some similar issues back in January. 

Fortunately, back then everything was back up and running in just over two hours – so if you’re in the middle of a long journey, there’s still hope that you’ll get some tunes before you get to your destination.

Spotify Status hasn’t yet sent out its standard “everything’s much better now” Tweet, so it looks like the issues are still ongoing – as confirmed by the fact that Spotify is now trending on Twitter with 667,000 tweets and counting.

Good news – Spotify seems to have fixed its outage in double-quick time, with the streaming app back and running for most people.

The official Spotify Status Twitter account just published the Tweet above and the Down Detector reports are now back to healthily low levels.

Some Twitter users are reporting residual issues like problems with downloading songs, so we’ll be keeping an eye on this to see if there are any knock-on effects. But for most Spotify fans, it should be back business as usual (phew).