What Is Spotify?
Spotify is the world’s leading music and podcast streaming platform. Since its launch in 2008, millions of users rely on Spotify to instantly stream songs, playlists, and podcasts across devices—be it on your phone, desktop, or smart speaker. Every time you tap “play,” you’re connecting to Spotify’s servers, powered by massive-scale cloud infrastructure.
What Is Google Cloud?
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is Google’s suite of cloud computing services. It offers everything from virtual machines and storage buckets to AI tools and identity management—built to support businesses of all sizes. Think of it as the digital backbone where apps run, data is stored, and user traffic is managed.
Spotify is a major GCP customer. It uses Google Cloud’s services—like storage, authentication, identity, and machine learning—to run its apps and backend systems. That means any disruption in GCP can ripple straight into Spotify’s operations.
What Happened On Thursday, June 12, 2025
On Thursday, June 12, 2025, at approximately 10:15 a.m. PT (1:15 p.m. ET), Google Cloud began experiencing issues—primarily tied to its Identity and Access Management service (IAM). Without IAM functioning correctly, apps could not verify credentials or access required resources.
The result? Authentication failures—users couldn’t log in, stream, or sync with cloud storage. That single rupture triggered outages across Google Home devices, Spotify, Discord, Twitch, and other apps relying on GCP.
On X, Spotify status admitted that they are aware of wha is happening and they are working to resolve it.
By around 11:30 a.m. PT (2:30 p.m. ET), DownDetector began lighting up:
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13,000 incident tickets for Google Cloud.
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27,000–44,000 for Spotify, according to different sources.
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Additional spikes for Discord, Snapchat, Meet, YouTube, Twitch, Shopify, AWS, and more.
Some reports mention even 44,000+ Spotify reports and 10,000+ for Google Cloud. Either way, the numbers reflect a major, widespread disruption.
Google’s own status page confirmed 13 cloud services were affected:
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Identity and Access Management
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Agent Assist
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Cloud Data Fusion
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Cloud Firestore
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Cloud Memorystore (Redis, Memcached)
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Cloud Shell & Cloud Workstations
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Contact Center Insights
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Dialogflow CX & ES
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App Engine
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BigQuery
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Cloud Bigtable
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Cloud Dataproc
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Cloud Storage
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Speech-to-Text & Text-to-Speech
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Vertex AI Search
Also impacted: Google Maps, Meet, Nest devices, YouTube, and services hosted on Cloudflare due to dependency issues. Either way, the numbers reflect a major, widespread disruption.
Here’s the crux:
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Authentication Breakdown: Spotify relies on GCP IAM to verify user logins and app-to-cloud communication.
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Service Access Disruption: Key backend services—like data stores, metadata services, AI-based recommendations, and playlists—are hosted on affected GCP resources.
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No Failover Mechanisms: When IAM and these core services faltered, Spotify lacked a robust fallback system—resulting in global downtime for millions.
Essentially, one weak link in Google’s infrastructure triggered cascading failures across Spotify’s architecture.
From the experience and based on historical cloud outages:
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Direct Impact: Can't log in, music fails to stream, playlist data inaccessible, search broken.
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Partial Workarounds: Offline playlists might still play; some cached content remains.
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Recovery Experience: Users should see service gradually restored—typically within 2–4 hours as IAM recovers, caches refill, and retries succeed.
For persistent issues, logging out–restarting and re-logging in can help re-establish connections—as Spotify’s support team suggested via social media.
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Redundant IAM Architecture: Segment IAM across regions or multi-cloud to avoid single-point failure.
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Automatic Failover: Implement backup identity systems or token caches, so valid sessions aren’t abruptly broken.
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Clear SLAs & Escalation: Faster emergency response and transparent communication about service levels.
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Graceful Degradation: Allow offline functionality, cached data access, even when the cloud is unstable.
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Multi-Cloud Strategy: Avoid over-reliance on one cloud—use alternate providers for critical services.
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Resilient Authentication: Flexible token refresh logic and local session validation during provider outages.
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Clear Outage Messaging: Prompt error messages informing users about service issues and steps they can take.
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Partial Workarounds: Offline playlists might still play; some cached content remains.
Spotify has previously faced service disruptions in 2025. For example, on May 27, tens of thousands of users were logged out or couldn’t search/play music; playlists even disappeared temporarily. That outage, though shorter, hints at systemic fragility—a pattern of unreliable dependency management.
Spotify’s Status X account has repeatedly acknowledged these disruptions, serving as an archive of recurring service reliability issues.
Cloud platforms have transformed how apps are built—making massive scale easy. But today’s incident reminds us: even top-tier clouds can falter. And when they do, downstream services like Spotify pay the price if they’re not architected for resilience.
For users, this can mean lost playlists, silent workouts, or forced reliance on offline modes. For Spotify and Google, it’s a wake-up call: invest in redundancy, multi-region failovers, and intelligent fallbacks.
Only by treating outages as inevitable can we build platforms that buffer them, not buckle under them. Your next workout playlist deserves that reliability.
DownDetector Report
Google Cloud Status
How Google Cloud’s Outage Took Spotify Offline
What Users Can Expect
How Google and Spotify Can Prevent This
Google Cloud
Spotify
Not the First Time in 2025
Conclusion
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