Spotify streaming is down in multiple countries

Spotify is experiencing problems with its streaming service in multiple countries including the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Turkey, South Africa, and other countries. Users have found when they try to play tracks they don't have downloaded to their devices they stop after a few seconds and, on desktop, an error message that reads "can't play current track" appears at the top of the app. On mobile, meanwhile, trying to visit artists' pages results in the error message "Something went wrong, check your internet connection and try again."

A rare occurrence — Spotify outages are rare but not unheard of. The company's support account on Twitter said on Wednesday morning it was aware of the issue and was working on it. "We’re aware of some issues right now and are checking them out! We’ll keep you posted," the message reads. The last time the service experienced serious problems was on July 10, when numerous users reported problems opening artist pages. On June 6 problems relating to Facebook's SDK also affected Spotify, along with TikTok, Venmo, SoundCloud, and other apps, albeit only for iPhone users.

The dangers of not owning your content — Lovers of physical formats or archivists who carefully store and backup their digital collections will, of course, be feeling smug (well, smugger than usual), because Spotify's problems are exactly what they worry about in a world where they never own, but only rent, their music.

We've reached out to Spotify for comment and will update this story when we get a response.

UPDATE (9:35 a.m. ET): Spotify's status update account on Twitter says the problem has been fixed and service should be back to normal. The company hasn't said anything yet about what caused the issues.