Spotify's total active users rose 27 percent to 551 million year-on-year
AFP

Thousands of listeners were unable to access music and podcasts on Sunday due to a temporary outage of Spotify. Over 40,000 users reported issues on downdetector.com, a platform for reporting problems with popular services, with outage reports beginning to surge around 10:45 a.m. ET.

In Spotify's desktop app, many users faced an error message stating, "Something went wrong," which hindered their attempts to play music. Similarly, the mobile app also proved unresponsive for some users, leading to frustration as they were unable to access their favorite tracks and podcasts. This dual outage across platforms added to the challenges faced by listeners during the service disruption.

DownDetector, which monitors global outages, has reported a significant increase in complaints about Spotify's functionality.

Spotify wrote on X on Sunday afternoon, "We're aware of some issues right now and are checking them out!"

About an hour later, the streaming service announced that everything was improving and the app seemed to be functioning normally again.

This isn't the first instance of Spotify pausing service due to an error; similar disruptions occurred on September 8, August 4, and April 19. While these hiccups do arise from time to time, Spotify has consistently managed to restore service swiftly, usually within a few hours.

Millions of people use Spotify, the largest streaming service in 2023. The platform boasts over 626 million users, including 246 million subscribers. Spotify is the largest streaming platform, accounting for approximately 31% of the total market share. It has a reported 626 million users and 246 million subscribers across more than 180 markets.