Temporary “outages” of services are relatively common. Spotify, Google, Facebook…practically all online services have had to claim that their online permanence commitment is 99.99% of the time, with a modest but highly recurring 0.01% of the time to justify such falls. Put another way, a service experiencing a temporary service outage is understandable and not particularly newsworthy.
But there are exceptions that do catch our attention, as they are a reminder of the importance of certain procedures and operations that may seem innocuous. Something that serves both those who experience its consequences and those responsible for similar tasks to prevent such events from repeating themselves. And, by the way, it also points out that the management of the affected company, in this case Spotify, has some gaps.
If you are a Spotify user and you usually use the service to listen to podcasts it is possible that between last night and this morning you had problems accessing some of this content. Specifically, the affected podcasts are those that use Megaphone, a podcast publishing platform acquired by Spotify in 2020 and that allows creators to distribute and monetize their content, which is distributed not only on Spotify, but also through other services.
The problem, which has already been solved, is that according to what we can read in The Verge the company forgot to renew an SSL certificate necessary for the normal operation of the service. Once it expired, at two in the morning (peninsular Spanish time), the company still took an hour to carry out the renewal, so that around eight hours had to pass until both the functions to publish and manage the podcasts as the possibility of downloading them returned to work normally.
During those hours, users of Spotify and other services connected to Megaphone could not download the contentswhich may have translated into audience and economic losses for its creators, who have observed with some surprise the incomprehensible (although not unprecedented, that must also be said) neglect of not having renewed the certificate, either automatically or manual, for which you would expect the person in charge to have some kind of reminder.
Podcasts are a key element for Spotify, to the point that it seems that it dedicates more effort and investment to them than to musical content, the original reason for the service. A legitimate and understandable strategy, but which makes it even more surprising that, due to an oversight like this, the availability of these has been affected.
