Spotify’s April 16, 2025 outage was caused by a failure in its server-side network perimeter, not a confirmed security attack or a problem with users’ devices. Spotify later said a simultaneous change to Envoy filter order triggered a bug that crashed network instances across regions; retries and a memory-configuration mismatch then prolonged the disruption.
What happened during the Spotify outage?
Spotify’s engineering postmortem says the outage affected the majority of users worldwide on April 16, 2025. The reported incident window was 12:20 to 15:45 UTC. Most traffic was disrupted, while Asia Pacific was unaffected because traffic there was lower at the time.
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Spotify’s detailed explanation came later, in an engineering postmortem published May 9. The Associated Press reported on April 16 that Spotify had not yet provided a cause. That difference reflects when the accounts were published: AP’s report captured the outage as it unfolded, while Spotify’s later postmortem described the technical cause.
Why was Spotify down?
Spotify attributed the incident to a cascading infrastructure failure involving Envoy Proxy, the software it uses at its network perimeter to receive and distribute user traffic. The explanation below is Spotify’s account; the available reporting does not establish that an independent technical audit verified it.
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A filter-order change triggered crashes
At 12:18 UTC, Spotify changed the order of Envoy filters across all regions at once. According to Spotify, the change triggered a bug in a custom filter, causing Envoy instances to crash simultaneously across regions. The incident report says alarms began at 12:20 UTC and the issue was escalated at 12:28 UTC.
Retries increased the load
As instances restarted, client-side retry behavior added more incoming traffic. Newly started instances then faced high load before they could stabilize.
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A memory mismatch kept instances cycling
Spotify says Envoy’s configured maximum heap was higher than the Kubernetes memory limit for the instances. Under the surge, memory use exceeded that limit, so Kubernetes shut instances down. The restarts and resulting traffic then helped repeat the cycle. In Asia Pacific, lower traffic kept memory use below the limit, according to Spotify.
What users experienced
The Associated Press reported problems loading the Spotify app and desktop site, playing or hearing songs, and using search. Some users also had trouble reaching Spotify’s support site. Downdetector received more than 48,000 reports at the peak shortly after 9:30 a.m. ET, according to AP. That number represents reports submitted to Downdetector, not a verified count of affected people.
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When did Spotify come back?
Spotify’s timeline says service recovered region by region: European traffic was recovering by 14:20 UTC and US traffic by 15:10 UTC. It records traffic patterns back to normal at 15:40 UTC, within the reported incident window ending at 15:45 UTC.
AP’s contemporaneous report used local Eastern Time estimates: it said the outage began at about 6:20 a.m. ET and service was functioning normally by 11:45 a.m. ET. Those estimates should not be substituted for Spotify’s later, more detailed UTC timeline.
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How did Spotify fix the outage?
Spotify says it increased total perimeter server capacity, bringing Envoy servers below Kubernetes memory limits and stopping the continuous cycling. It also said it fixed the filter bug and corrected the mismatch between Envoy’s maximum heap and the Kubernetes memory limit.
The company said it would improve how perimeter configuration changes are rolled out and monitored so similar problems could be detected sooner. Its postmortem does not establish whether every planned improvement was later completed.
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Is Spotify down now?
Spotify’s status page showed “All Systems Operational” with no incidents reported when checked on October 8, 2026. That is a snapshot for that date, not a guarantee of service availability afterward. Check Spotify’s status page for current incident information.
If the status page shows no incident but Spotify still will not work for you, the problem may be local to your connection or device rather than a broad service outage. The April 2025 incident itself was on Spotify’s server-side infrastructure, so changing headphones or installing a repair utility would not have fixed it.
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