Even the status page is down
And here I am playing King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's latest single on repeat in VLC like a chump.
I hope they post a post-mortem afterwords. Given that the outage seems to be on an infra-level (support domain is far from the app stuff) I take it something really funky has happened.
Huge fan here, sad to see people so up in arms. Spotify offers two valuable things: of course, every song ever with no need to tag them, manage your library etc etc
But most importantly it’s insanely good for discovering new cool music.
It’s the latter - discovery - that I pay for. Song radio, artist radio, “discover weekly” get me through the day.
Spotify outages are rare enough no one thought it could go down. They’re doing well. Consider: if you manage your own music library there’ll be days the hard drive doesn’t work, vpn dies etc etc. - to operate at 99.99% reliability you’re only allowed 4 minutes’ downtime per month. If you dick around fixing your NAS for an hour you just blew your whole year’s downtime budget.
So for Spotify to go so long without downtime is amazing.
Looking forward to the postmortem!
The outage forced me to use the free Amazon Music service that comes with my Amazon Prime subscription. It has many of the annoyances that come with its video services, including ever-present up-sells and muddiness around what's available or pay-walled. Apparently rewinding a song is a premium feature, too.
Suffice it to say that I'll wait out this and any outage before switching if this is how they treat "less than" subscribers.
Happen to be flying right now and luckily downloaded content continues to play. (Obviously.) I am looking forward to reading a post-mortem.
My trusty local files from bandcamp, 7digital, and amazon have yet to fail me.
Streaming itself seems to work though, I could just press play on my Sonos system and it just continued with the playback.
This outage gets me thinking of alternatives. It's nice to have just a folder of music that is completely offline.
App and streaming mostly work for me (slower then ususal and search seems broken). Interesting outage.
at least offline playback works, though the ui is still sluggish when it thinks it should be able to reach their servers (airplane mode is snappy, bad internet connections or service outage it waits for long timeouts).
Not surprised. Spotify crapping out constantly and songs disappearing drove me away from streaming. So in 2023 I stopped paying for streaming services entirely and have gone back to actually buying CDs and ripping them or hitting bandcamp for FLACs etc.
Life is much better. No one can take my shit away, I don't depend on some transient service existing or license or any external competence and I can choose how much I want to pay and when. It just works.