On September 29, 2026, Spotify experienced a widespread outage that affected thousands of users across multiple markets. According to Downdetector, more than 17,000 U.S. users reported problems by 10:12 AM ET, though the platform’s figures are based on user submissions and do not represent the exact number of affected customers.
The disruption impacted different features for different users. Some listeners could not search for songs or open playlists, while others faced difficulties connecting to the service or loading the app. However, some users reported that music playback continued to work normally. The outage varied by account and location, with reports coming in from the U.S., UK, and other regions.
Spotify acknowledged the problem and confirmed that its teams were investigating the disruption. The company did not immediately disclose the cause or provide a specific timeline for full restoration. Notably, Spotify’s official status page did not initially reflect the scale of the reports, highlighting a gap between formal service monitoring and user-reported issues.
For many users, the search function was the most noticeable failure. Some could open the app but could not find songs or artists. Others saw error messages when trying to access playlists. The web version worked for some users when the app was down, while others continued to face issues across platforms.
As of the time of reporting, the technical cause of the outage remained under investigation. Spotify had not publicly identified the root cause. Users still experiencing problems were advised to check Spotify’s official status channels, restart or update the app, or visit the company’s ongoing issues board for known problems.
The Spotify outage occurred alongside a separate service disruption affecting Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant in the U.S., though there was no indication that the two incidents were connected.
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