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- Spotify experienced a widespread outage on May 12 2026, affecting apps, web players, and support services for several hours
- The Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq‑313 Team claimed responsibility, saying it launched a DDoS attack on Spotify’s servers
- The same group recently targeted Canonical, adding to its sporadic record of disruptive cyberattacks against major platforms
The Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq-313 Team, a hacking collective which has been sporadically targeting companies and services across the Western world, has claimed responsibility for the major outage Spotify experienced recently.
On May 12 2026, thousands of Spotify users reported having issues with both the app and the web player, and the support site. The music streaming service confirmed being “aware of some issues right now with the app” and said it was investigating the matter.
Now, the pro-Iran hacking group said it was to blame for the outage, confirming that Spotify suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
Revenge for Khamenei?
“The hand of revenge will reach the killers of Imam Khamenei,” the group allegedly said on Telegram, the Jerusalem Post reported. In the same announcement, the group said it “carried out a massive cyber attack targeting Spotify’s main servers, causing a major disruption to the website and completely disabling the application”
The problems began around 12pm ET / 5pm BST, with the first reports of the outage appearing on Down Detector. Reports grew steadily over the next 20-30 minutes, peaking at around 14,000 at 1.20pm ET / 6.20pm BST — then appeared to drop off.
However, more than 2 hours later, users in both the US and UK reported struggling to get the app to load on either desktop or mobile — though offline tunes did seem to work. Eventually, the app on multiple platforms came back to life, and Spotify confirmed the issue was fixed shortly before 5pm ET / 10pm BST.
The 313 Team is not the most active group around, but it also recently struck Canonical, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu.
“Canonical’s web infrastructure is under a sustained, cross-border attack and we are working to address it. We will provide more information in our official channels as soon as we are able to,” the company said at the time.
Discussing the attack on unofficial Ubuntu forums, community members confirmed that the distro’s security API was affected, as well as multiple websites. Updates and system installs were also unavailable at the time.
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