April 17, 2025 — Popular music streaming platform Spotify experienced a massive global outage on Wednesday morning, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to stream music or access search functions.
Beginning around 8:50 a.m. ET, Spotify users across the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the world began reporting issues with the service. Within 15 minutes, reports surged from 323 to over 20,000, eventually crossing the 40,000 mark, according to outage tracking site Downdetector.
Global Reach of the Outage
The technical issues appear to be widespread, with outage reports also coming in from Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, the UAE, and Israel. Users complained of both the mobile and desktop apps failing to load, with errors such as “couldn’t load the page” appearing when attempting to use the search function.
Spotify Responds
Spotify acknowledged the problem at 8:45 a.m. ET through its @SpotifyStatus handle on X (formerly Twitter), saying:
“We’re aware of some issues right now and are checking them out!”
A Spotify spokesperson later provided a statement to Fast Company, confirming:
“We are aware of the outage and working to resolve it as soon as possible. The reports of this being a security hack are completely inaccurate.”
No Signs of Breach, But Services Affected
Despite growing speculation online, Spotify has made it clear that the disruption was not caused by a cyberattack. Still, the search functionality, playback features, and overall user experience were severely impacted during the outage.
As of now, Spotify has not provided a clear explanation for the outage’s cause, but services were gradually being restored by late morning ET.