Spotify Outage Affected Around 40,000 Users, Streaming Services Resumed

Many users reported issues where they were unable to stream anything other than their recently played songs.

Audio streaming giant Spotify was down on Sunday for around three hours which left around 40,000 users in the US unable to listen to their favourite songs. According to Downdetector.com, an online tracking website which uses a range of sources including user reports to determine when a platform is down, around 600 users were still having issues in the US as of 3 pm ET. Spotify, in a post on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), said, “Everything’s looking much better now!”

Reuters reached out to Spotify for a comment on the matter, but the audio streaming giant did not respond to the news agency in time about the reason behind this outage. 

Many users reported issues where they were unable to stream anything other than their recently played songs. Playlists would either not load at all or took unusually long to appear. Additionally, some users experienced interruptions where their music would stop playing abruptly without reason. These frustrations were shared across various posts on the community page, with multiple individuals expressing difficulties in maintaining smooth playback or accessing their usual content. Overall, the platform seemed to face a range of performance problems affecting both streaming and playlist access.

Spotify Brings Back Song Lyrics For Free Users

Around two months back, Spotify reversed its decision to limit lyrics access for non-paying users. Earlier this year, the Swedish music streaming giant had restricted free account holders from viewing lyrics for only three songs per month, while paid subscribers enjoyed unlimited access to lyrics. This move, which began as a test last fall and saw wider implementation in May, garnered significant user dissatisfaction and criticism.

As per a report by Engadget, Spotify announced that it will be phasing out these restrictions over the course of time. A Spotify representative was quoted as saying that the platform "constantly evaluates and adjusts its features" across different subscription tiers, markets, and devices.