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Internet outages: Spotify, Discord and more are finally back up

A brief period of outages

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By Tom Bedford
last updated
Downdetector reports of the internet outage
Downdetector reports of the internet outage
(Image: © DownDetector)

If you're reading this, don't worry - Spotify and Discord aren't down (well, unless they've fallen apart again). This is a live blog we set up on March 8, when the two popular services went offline, but they're back now.

Music streaming leviathan Spotify and hugely popular chat platform Discord both suffered major outages for over an hour, and loads of people reported issues with the apps online. But they're back now.

It's not exactly clear what happened, or why these two services, in particular, were affected. They weren't the only two apps that were hit, as reports suggested Facebook,  Wikipedia, Google Cloud and more were all struggling too, but Spotify and Discord were the worst hit.

It's all over now though, and you can listen to music or chat with your friends without having to worry. Phew. That was a big distraction from the Apple March event but now we're back to iDevices.

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This is our first post of this internet outage live blog - we're investigating what's going on now.

In the US, Downdetector is seeing outages for:

  • Spotify
  • Discord
  • Wikipedia
  • Amazon Web Services
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Destiny
  • Cloudflare
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Google Cloud
  • Twitch
  • Multiple Apple services
  • TikTok
  • Snapchat

In the UK, the affected webpages are similar:

  • Spotify
  • Discord
  • Twitter
  • Amazon Web Services
  • Destiny
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Cloudflare
  • Facebook
  • Google Cloud
  • Revolut
  • Snapchat
  • Steam

It's worth pointing out that not everybody will be affected by these outages - but enough are that some companies are commenting on the issues.

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Discord is one such company, which apologized for the issue. Although it did follow up by saying "time to go outside everyone", which seems a little sassy. OK, mom.

Spotify is another service which is down.

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However this definitely isn't as widespread an outage as we sometimes see, because multiple members of the TechRadar team are accessing it just fine.

That said, all surveyed members of team are UK-based. This sounds a lot like a US problem.

Some other reports are coming in from TechRadar team members in the US. They're finding that Discord and Spotify are both down.

Oh, you might see on Downdetector that the online Apple store is down - well, that's not quite because of the outage (or maybe it is, but there's another reason).

That's because Apple's March Event just wrapped up, and the company usually takes its online store offline while it populates it with more products.

So yeah, busy day in tech. We saw the iPhone SE (2022), iPad Air 5, M1 Ultra and more. You can read our full Apple Event live blog here. Also, the store has just gone back online.

Reports suggest that Spotify and Discord are the two sites seeing the worst outages. In fact a Twitter trend page has been started where people are sharing memes.

At least Twitter isn't down.

Despite the fact that users are reporting issues with Amazon Web Services, it doesn't seem like the Bezos company's web-hosting platform is the problem, because then lots more would be down. 

Oh, and AWS hasn't reported anything as far as we can tell.

We'll bring you more when we work out what's going on.

It's starting to sound like services are returning to normality?

On Downdetector, reports of issues have been plummeting for the last few minutes. We're checking in with some people to see if the apps are running again.

Uh, nope - one of my US colleagues has confirmed Discord is still down for them. Well, maybe it's slowly getting back up, but not for everyone just yet.

Spotify's community page still reports a problem, with an official post from 50 minutes ago stating that the main issue was that people couldn't log in.

Discord's error status log also suggests the problem is ongoing, but there's possibly another reason behind the decline in user report numbers on Downdetector.

It's possible that, since everyone knows there's a Spotify and Discord outage now, no-one's bothering to report it any more. This would make it look like the issue has abated, when it actually hasn't.

We thought these issues were US-only, but a few TechRadar team members in the UK have reported that the web app isn't working for them either.

Well, it's working for me, so I'll just enjoy that. And YouTube, Apple Music, Prime Music, Tidal and the billions of other music streaming apps are still working, so hopefully no-one is having to sit in silence now.

We've heard reports that Spotify is a lot more stable if you use the desktop app, rather than the online site. 

So if you do normally use Spotify's website for music (why?) maybe try the desktop app. Still, this might just be hearsay or confirmation bias, and our survey size is pretty limited, so don't get your hopes up.

A 'source' (someone we knows who plays it) has told us that Destiny is 'down for maintenance' on Xbox... but is still working fine on Stadia.

Remember Stadia? Well maybe now's the time to dust off your... err, virtual console.

We're hearing more reports that Discord is back up, including from people on team who use it. Maybe the storm really has passed?

At least the Elden Ring servers aren't down. If I had to play that game without seeing the same three jokes repeated from every player message, I'm not sure I'd be able to enjoy the game.

Spotify is reporting that it's back in action.

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So you should be able to access it soon, though servers might be rammed with everyone jumping on board, so give it a few minutes.

Oh, discordstatus.com has got a report saying "traffic is coming back online" though "some functionality will remain intentionally disabled until the service stabilizes". 

The status bar has gone from red to orange too, which is probably a good sign, right?

And Discord is now back up too.

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It sounds like they've put it back together with twine and PVA glue, so it might be a bit slow to begin with. Maybe go gentle on it, start with typed messages before you go hard on the gifs and voice calls.

So what happened here?

It's not exactly clear - not enough websites went down for this to be another web domain host problem, but it was too broad to be an issue with any one platform.

Let's hope that a company comes out and says what happens, otherwise this'll just end up 'one of those things'.

Is Slack down now?

After yesterday's outage, we have a new one today as it appears Slack is now having problems.