Spotify Experiences Major Outage
Sometime before Noon EST on Saturday Spotify experienced a major outage. Both the Spotify.com site and the streaming service were down for several hours.
"Looks like we might be having some connection issues. Our team is looking into it right now," said the first tweet around 11AM. Later it was determined that the problems were mostly in the London site. Two houts later: "To update – we've found the problem and are working on a fix. The minute
I know when it will be solved I'll update".
Playlists still a problem.
By mid-afternoon on Saturday the service was slowly becoming functional, but many users could not access playlists. "If you don't see your playlists don't panic, it's temporar,y said a late afternoon message on Spotify's Get Satisfaction community site.
Think this is demonstrative of why music will never be solely ‘in the cloud.’
There’s always gonna be outages, lack of strong internet service, insert random variable here. I can’t help the feeling that stability counts…knowing that I have my library in multiple forms (cd, mp3, backed up) is a good feeling. And knowing I have unfettered, more instant than ‘instant’ access? priceless.
Spotify has had streaming problems for months now. It had been near flawless up to that point.
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. Very bad form!
Is this a good thing gone bad? Or just a passing glitch? I fear the former.
You make a good point. But when you iPod fails at the gym, who is there to help you? When a cloud service goes down, a team of techies jump into action.
Bruce,
A team of techs jumping to action is good if that is what happens. But it appears to be what has NOT happened at Spotify over recent weeks.
Premium customers have been left hanging with no idea whether the company is on top of the problems they have been experiencing or not.
Totally agree. The Amazon Kindle / George Orwell debacle of last year was another golden example of the pitfalls of the cloud.
Spotify has been having on and off connection issues for me for weeks. 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.
Just to clarify my position, I think streaming services will become (already are?) the back bone of music discovery, allowing people to skim across a broad range of new music with minimal commitment.
But personally, when I find a keeper, I want my own offline copy that I can use entirely on my own terms.
I have been a paining Spotify user for a few months now but my patience is running low over this; it’s impossible to be sure where the problem lies but these are just too frequent to ignore.
(My desktop music has been skipping all morning and the android version almost never works over 3g for more than 10 minutes.)