Spotify is the world's largest music and audio streaming platform with over 600 million users across 180+ markets, including 230+ million premium subscribers. The platform hosts over 100 million tracks, 5 million podcasts, and 350,000 audiobooks, serving as the primary music consumption service for hundreds of millions of listeners daily. For developers, Spotify provides a Web API for building music-integrated applications, a developer SDK for playback control, and embeddable players. Spotify's playlist recommendation engine and Discover Weekly algorithm are powered by sophisticated machine learning infrastructure running on Google Cloud.
Spotify outages have generated some of the highest volumes of user reports on Downdetector, with one incident producing over 50,000 simultaneous reports. Common causes include backend authentication failures that prevent users from logging in across all clients, playback infrastructure issues causing songs to skip or fail to load, and search and recommendation service degradation. Mobile app-specific outages from failed app updates or push notification infrastructure failures are also common. Spotify's migration from on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud has occasionally introduced transitional availability issues.
When Spotify goes down, hundreds of millions of users lose access to music and podcast streaming simultaneously. Playlists cannot be accessed, downloads fail to play despite being cached locally in some cases, and the search and discovery features stop working. For content creators and artists, Spotify outages mean lost streaming revenue. Businesses using Spotify for office background music and waiting room audio experience disruptions. The cultural impact of a Spotify outage is significant given the platform's role in daily routines worldwide.
Use this page to check Spotify availability. Spotify outages typically generate massive user report volumes — one incident saw over 50,000 Downdetector reports simultaneously. If the app loads but songs will not play, it may be a playback infrastructure issue. If you cannot log in at all, it is likely an authentication backend outage.
Playback failures can result from Spotify platform outages, network connectivity issues, expired premium subscriptions, or corrupted local cache. Try logging out and back in, clearing the app cache, or switching between WiFi and cellular. If the issue affects multiple devices simultaneously, it is likely a Spotify-wide outage rather than a local problem.
Premium subscribers with downloaded songs can sometimes play them offline during outages. However, Spotify's DRM verification occasionally requires server connectivity even for downloaded content. If the app itself cannot authenticate your session, downloaded content may also be inaccessible. This limitation has been a long-standing source of user frustration during outages.
Spotify experiences minor issues several times per month and major outages roughly quarterly. Most incidents are resolved within 1-3 hours. The platform's massive user base means even brief disruptions generate enormous numbers of user reports, making Spotify outages consistently among the most-reported on Downdetector and social media.
Monitor Spotify with PinusX Uptime Monitor for free. Get Slack and email alerts within 60 seconds of any disruption. While Spotify does not have a traditional status page, external monitoring provides independent verification of platform availability when user reports on social media may be ambiguous.
Monitor Spotify uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.