Spotify has been hit by a service outage which has left thousands of users worldwide unable to stream music.
British users have been unable to stream music and podcasts for much of the afternoon since the audio giant suffered a glitch just after midday on Wednesday.
The streaming company has confirmed it is aware of a problem with its services and said in a statement posted to social media that it was “checking them out”.
Thousands of UK users have reported being unable to stream music via Spotify online, with audio already downloaded to a user’s library only being accessible.
According to service monitoring site Downdetector, problems began at Spotify at around 1pm on Wednesday, with more than 20,000 reports of user issues with the service being logged since then.
It said users were reporting problems with both the Spotify app and website.
In a statement posted to X, formerly Twitter, Spotify said: “We’re aware of some issues right now and are checking them out.”
The company did not offer any further information on what has caused the issue or for how long its services may be affected.
In February, the Sweden-based firm announced its user numbers had hit a record high of 675 million globally, a rise of 12% over the last year.
Spotify users flocked to X to see if others were also experiencing issues and some joked they would switch to rival Apple music. Another quipped: "Why having CDs, vinyl and YouTube is a must."
Some users on social media said they could still play downloaded music but could not search or view artists on the app.
Spotify has more than 675 million users worldwide. While it is unknown how many have been impacted globally, around 50,000 American users have issued outage reports to Downdetector.
New York City, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago have reported problems and users in the UK, parts of Europe, China and South America are also experiencing issues.
Even the Spotify Support website is down, showing users a 'server error' message.
Downdetector shows 61% of problems stem from the app, 24% audio streaming and 15% of users reported issue with the website.
In a promising update, Techradar journalist Mark Wilson said: "I don't want to speak too soon, but there are signs that Spotfy's issues might be easing slightly. My colleague Jake Krol in the US says that search is now working for him again (it still isn't for me), but that the app's homepage is still down."
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Spotify down as thousands unable to stream music with audio giant investigating outage – Daily Star
