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Why Is Spotify Down? People Are Freaking Out

by Keiko Zoll

On Wednesday morning, commuters, offices, and music aficionados collectively gasped when Spotify — the popular streaming on-demand music service — went down. Why is Spotify down? According to its official support Twitter account — @SpotifyCares — even Spotify isn't sure why its app is down, but it informed users that it was "investigating some issues and finding out more" in a tweet posted Wednesday morning. No official word came from the main @Spotify account, but it looks like all service issues are reported solely through Spotify's @SpotifyCares and @SpotifyStatus accounts.

Update: As of 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time, both the @SpotifyStatus and @SpotifyCares Twitter accounts reported that its streaming music service was back online and that users should try logging out and back in again if they encounter errors.

It's an outage that was felt around the world, and Spotify users were kind of freaking out about it. When trying to open the app, Spotify users found they were unable to connect to the service, many left with an endlessly spinning wheel icon instead. According to the online outage tracking service Down Detector, the Spotify outage was reported most significantly across the United States and continental Europe; small pockets of outages were also reported in Brazil and Singapore. Spotify did not immediately return Romper's request for comment.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that Spotify has 100 million active monthly users — 10 times the number of subscribers of streaming rival Apple Music. In March, Spotify announced it had 30 million paid subscribers, which means an outage this widespread has left a lot of paying customers pretty upset with the streaming music service, who took to Twitter to vent their frustrations.

You could say that Spotify going down was not unlike the destruction of Alderaan in Star Wars. Jedi master Obi Wan Kenobi put it best: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened." Spotify going down for millions of users is definitely something terrible indeed.