Spotify experienced a widespread outage affecting song playback today. The problems first started around 8AM ET and prevented a large number of Spotify users from playing songs properly for more than an hour. Songs only played only for a few seconds before they paused and the Spotify client displayed the error “can’t play the current song.” Spotify said it was “aware of some issues right now and are checking them out.”
Spotify has not explained the outage, but it appears to be related to the company forgetting to renew its TLS certificate. A Cloudflare engineer noticed that an important Spotify certificate expired, and the service returned minutes after this certificate had been renewed again.
We’re aware of some issues right now and are checking them out! We’ll keep you posted.
— Spotify Status (@SpotifyStatus) August 19, 2020
It’s unusual for Spotify to suffer from outages. The music streaming service last experienced issues during a broader Facebook iOS SDK problem in July that meant the app crashed upon startup. We’ve reached out to Spotify to comment further on today’s outage, and we’ll update you accordingly.
Update, August 19th 09:40AM ET: Updated with Spotify certificate information and the service’s return.
