Spotify crashes for users around the world
Thousands of Spotify users were left unable to play music for more than an hour this afternoon after the service experienced technical difficulties.
It appeared to affect customers around the globe, with the majority reported in Europe. According to outage tracker site DownDetector the issues started at around 1pm, with 92 per cent of the reported issues in music streaming. A handful of customers reported issues with logging in.
It is reported Spotify users could only play songs already downloaded to devices, and in many cases songs cut out after a few seconds.
Spotify acknowledged the issue but has not said what caused the outage. Tweeting from its customer care account, the music streaming site said it was “aware of some issues right now”.
About an hour and a half after the initial reports, Spotify tweeted: “Good news! Everything is good to go and looking happy.”
Spotify has nearly 300m users worldwide. It added 6m new premium subscribers in the first quarter of the year, boasting 138m paid customers.
The service saw a 31 per cent rise in monthly active users in the first quarter but there had been a fall in numbers in February among countries hit hardest by coronavirus, including Spain and Italy.
This week Apple stepped up its music offering to challenge Spotify by launching two new radio stations. Apple renamed its flagship radio station Beats 1 to Apple Music 1 and added two new stations, Apple Music Hits and Apple Music Country.
Last year Spotify filed a complaint with the European Commission antitrust regulator last year, citing Apple’s “unfair advantage” over rival streaming services.