Spotify says it is investigating issues with its website after thousands of reports of outages across the web.
Down Detector recorded more than 15,000 incidents of Spotify being reported down across the web. The website tracks outages for popular services like Spotify, Twitter, Gmail, and other online services. User-submitted errors about certain platforms can often be a good indicator of a problem before an official statement.
Spotify has experienced at least two outages this month, with another at the beginning of April 2023 that impacted around 20,000 people in the United States and 8,000 people in the UK. Spotify’s growth may be contributing to the periodic outages as the company reported 515 million monthly active users for the first time ever earlier this month. Spotify says it expects to grow to 530 million monthly active users by the end of the next quarter and has plans to grow to one billion active users by 2030—reaching $100 billion in annual revenue.
The most commonly reported problems include inability to access the Spotify app, website or stream audio from the platform. According to reports on social media, some people are able to get the site to load, but no audio to stream. “[An album] isn’t working anymore as are several songs on the album, it was working the day before yesterday,” reports one person. So far, Spotify support on Twitter hasn’t addressed the second outage in April.
The only message on Twitter remains from the April 19 status update, “we’ve received some more reports and we’re looking into them. Thanks for the heads-up!” Spotify strategy of casting a wide net by providing generous free trials could be having an impact here. Many free subscribers start three-month free trials, which means any revenue generated from the lead starts a quarter late even though the server load starts and continues.