Spotify was down • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotify was down

#131

Post by latchkey » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 8:41 PM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #55

AWS is having problems, the two are probably related https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/ EDIT: someone below mentioned Spotify is on GCP but Google appears to be having issues as well https://downdetector.com/status/google-cloud/

https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1501292209781366786

Incidentally: @DownDetector is garbage. It merely looks at mentions on Twitter of people saying something is down. That includes incorrect speculation. And it even amplifies that speculation recursively. It’s reliably wrong, by design.

Re: Spotify was down

#132

Post by faeyanpiraat » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 8:44 PM UTC

colinmhayes wrote: post #120

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've said before: Spotify / Tidal / YouTube Music is great for discovery, IMO. Just not consumption. I use them for checking out new artists, or albums by artists that I haven't heard before. But once I've passed from the "Huh, that was interesting" stage to "Yeah, I think I'm gonna listen to this album again in the future", it's time to buy it, rip it to MP3/FLAC(if I bought a physical copy), and get it into my m…

The whole point of music streaming services is to avoid doing this. Maybe it works for you, but that does not sound like a sustainable strategy for someone who listens to 100+ albums a year.

I have like 400 favorite songs from wide variety of genres, and I've seen some songs becoming unavailable over time. And I don't know what it was, so I have no way to get it back in any way.

Not a huge loss, but annoying.

Re: Spotify was down

#133

Post by testplzignore » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 8:45 PM UTC

gusfoo wrote: post #126

A suspected BGP leak https://bgpstream.com/event/287678 happened at 17:52 in the Netherlands. Downdetector (roughly) shows the graph start to spike around https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/ 17:55. Could be coincidence, of course.

Assuming that there is a connection between the Discord and Spotify outages...

The Discord status page ( https://discordstatus.com/ ) says this: "We believe the cause is upstream of our service and our providers are working on determining and correcting the issue upstream."

In my experience, vague blaming of upstream providers is either BGP or a cable cut.

Re: Spotify was down

#134

Post by mellavora » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 8:48 PM UTC

Anyone familiar with nugs.net? https://www.nugs.net/about-us.html They promise CD-quality downloads and streaming.

Thinking of signing up. If I like it, I'll endorse it the next time a "spotify is problematic" story comes up on HN.

Also, if you have a favorite spotify alternative, might be interesting to mention it here.

Re: Spotify was down

#135

Post by gchokov » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 8:56 PM UTC

East Europe, no downtime, I was listing during the whole time. I often wonder, how can Spotify be so-fricking-fast and reliable.

Re: Spotify was down

#136

Post by Nekhrimah » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:00 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #124

ibejoeb wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which interface are you using? I use the android app and I'm pretty happy with it. My use case is primarily playing content on Sonos and cast devices.

desktop

The desktop app is indeed horrible. To start with, a substantial part of the right hand screen real estate is permanently to your social media presence. Don't want to connect anything? Still can't dismiss this entire waste of space.

On iOS it's fairly simply to remove songs from the active queue. God help you on desktop. No consistency in design.

Please pay more UI/UX staff, and less Rogan.

Re: Spotify was down

#137

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:07 PM UTC

gatonegro wrote: post #105

apetresc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why? Because once every year or two it'll be unavailable for a couple of hours?

Because my access to it shouldn't depend on a third party's uptime. The fact that it's "a couple of hours once a year" doesn't make it any better. We've been conditioned to just accepting that random outages and corporate decisions can take things away from us, but it is a ridiculous proposition that only benefits the bottom line of the service providers. I understand that the "convenience" angle might be attractive…

[deleted]

Re: Spotify was down

#138

Post by heavenlyblue » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:21 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #78

heavenlyblue wrote: post #13

Spotify decided to log out while on the flight :(

It logged you out while in "airplane mode"? How did it decide to do that? Genuinely curious, I don't use it but would have expected offline things to continue as they were while cut off from the rest of the network.

I was not in airplane mode, but we were 20k ft above ground. It logged me out about 40 minutes into the flight which makes 0 sense to me.

To be fair to Spotify it never happened to me before. Maybe it’s their DRM that just locks you out if it can’t reach the server with a timeout of 1 hour or so (1 hour conditional on the last attempt being a failure).

Re: Spotify was down

#139

Post by radicality » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:42 PM UTC

julkali wrote: post #48

sublimefire wrote: post #24

The painful bit was that I got automatically logged out with all of those "offline" songs. Is it a feature or a bug? IMO if there was no logout then many clients would just keep playing the cached songs, and people would not notice a disruption that much.

I am under the impression that Spotify doesn't care a lot about UX in general. Inconsistencies in gesture handling, sessions still buggy after years, being logged out as soon as the API is unreachable, directly playing a song when opening a link, etc

Agreed, the UX is awful. Just a moment ago I was attempting to unshuffle my Discover Weekly playlist on an iPad, and honestly still have no idea how to do it. The big green play button shows a small activated shuffle icon, but how to undo it is either impossible or requires knowing the right sequence of UI button presses, swipes and magic spells.

Re: Spotify was down

#140

Post by AitchEmArsey » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 9:43 PM UTC

l30n4da5 wrote: post #102

AitchEmArsey wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cancelled my subscription last week precisely because of the poor UX. It really pisses me off that they charge what feels like a disproportionate amount (certainly more than I've ever spent on music elsewhere), offer a very simple service only passably well, then waste their revenue on SV dev salaries (with no obvious benefit to the users in features or stability) - and of course their illustrious podcast hosts.

> then waste their revenue on SV dev salaries wouldnt really call that a waste if those devs are producing meaningful features and/or fixing bugs. devs work on the features they are told to, they don't direct what features get put in place or even how those features should behave in UX, most of the time. seems more a design and/or project management failure, to me.

I'd say if those people are not being utilized to improve the product, then yes it is a waste - who is to blame for the waste is a different matter, but management is the obvious place to look.