Spotify says it's back after an hourslong outage disrupts thousands of users

Audio By Carbonatix

NEW YORK (AP) — Spotify experienced a widespread outage Wednesday — with tens of thousands of users reporting problems with the popular music and audio streamer. But the platform said it was back up and running hours later.

“All clear — thanks for your patience,” Spotify wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, just after noon E.T. The company pointed to its support account, @SpotifyCares, for users who might need further assistance.

Earlier in the day, many Spotify users said that they were having difficulty loading both the app and desktop site, playing or hearing songs and using its search function. In addition to loading and playback issues, downtime updates noted that some users were also having problems accessing the platform’s support site.

Spotify told The Associated Press that the outage began around 6:20 a.m. ET on Wednesday — but said it was “back up and functioning normally” by 11:45 a.m. ET.

Outage reports appeared to peak just after 9:30 a.m. ET, when more 48,000 users shared problems with Spotify, per data from Downdetector. As of the early afternoon, just under 1,500 reports lingered.

Spotify did not immediately provide more information about what might have caused the outage. But the Stockholm-based company previously said that “reports of this being a security hack are completely inaccurate."

Spotify currently boasts having a total of more than 675 million users around the world, including 263 million subscribers across over 180 markets.