Spotify experienced a major outage on Saturday that took down the entire streaming service and for a time even the company's web site. By Saturday evening Spotify was back up though some playlists were still being restored. Overheating was the culprit according to Spotify's Andres Shers. "Saturday evening there was a power outage at a large data site in London where we host some of our servers," said Shers. "The backup power kicked in as planned, however, one of the big air conditioners in the data centre did not start properly ...without this cooling unit the temperature rose very quickly and our servers shut down to protect themselves from over heating."
"Once we discovered the source of the problem we started work on bringing the servers back online." he concluded, "but because of the large number of servers and the complexity of the system it took a few hours to get everything up and running again" As of Sunday evening, all systems were working properly though some premium subscribers were ebing contacted directly about billing anomalies caused by the outage.
Some Spotify Users Say Problems Isn't Isolated -
"Spotify has had streaming problems for months now," one regularSpotify user told Hypebot. "What is worse is that the company has been ignoring the hundreds of complaints from angry subscribers on the Get Satisfaction forum. Worse still, they erased most of these complaints."
Others said Spotify's outages made them question the wisdom of having their music in the cloud. "Spotify has been having on and off connection issues for me for weeks, " said one. "Only a few minutes here and there, but more often than not I'll just switch back to my offline music collection before they get it sorted."
