Monday morning hit a sudden speed bump for music fans everywhere. It usually starts the same way: your song cuts out, or the app refuses to load. You toggle your Wi-Fi, restart your phone, and pray it’s just a bad signal. Then the texts start rolling in. For me, it was my boyfriend asking the dreaded question: “Is your Spotify down?” He wasn’t the only one. Thousands of users worldwide faced the same dead air.
Downdetector, a site that tracks online service interruptions, recorded over 10,000 reports in just a few minutes. That number represents only the people who took the time to log a complaint, so the actual number of affected listeners was likely much higher. The outage hit right during the morning rush for many, killing podcasts in the middle of commutes and silencing workout playlists at the gym.
People immediately flocked to X (formerly Twitter) to confirm they weren’t crazy. The timeline is filled with jokes and memes about having to listen to their own thoughts instead of music. It is funny, but it also highlights how much we rely on the service. We don’t own our music collections anymore; we rent access to them. So when the server trips, the world gets very quiet.
Spotify’s team quickly caught wind of the problem. At 9:45 AM ET, the “Spotify Status” account posted a brief message admitting they were aware of “some issues” and were investigating. They didn’t explain exactly what broke, but they put engineers on the job immediately to patch the leak.
Luckily for everyone trying to focus at work, the blackout didn’t last long. Less than an hour later, at 10:34 AM ET, the company gave the all-clear. They announced that things were looking better and the service was back up and running.
If your app is still acting weird, you might need to force-close it and reopen it to refresh the connection. But for most, the crisis is over. You can finally put your headphones back on and drown out the world again.
