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A Spotify publisher was down Monday night. The culprit? A lapsed security certificate

NPR | By Amina Kilpatrick
Published May 31, 2022 at 10:48 PM EDT
Lionel Bonaventure
/
AFP via Getty Images

On Monday night, some Spotify users went to download their favorite podcasts and were met with an error. By Tuesday morning, the issue was resolved. What was the source of the massive disruption impacting some of the platform's biggest producers? An expired security certificate.

The SSL security certificate is what keeps a website secure by enabling encryption, giving it the "s" in HTTPS. For Megaphone, the podcast advertising and publishing platform Spotify acquired in 2020, the certificate expired Monday evening.

Shortly thereafter, publishers and listeners for Megaphone-hosted podcasts experienced service disruptions.

"Megaphone experienced a platform outage due to an issue related to our SSL certificate," a Spotify spokesperson told NPR. "During the outage, clients were unable to access the Megaphone CMS and podcast listeners were unable to download podcast episodes from Megaphone-hosted publishers. Megaphone service has since been restored."

The entire outage lasted for about nine hours, with Megaphone publishing real-time updates of the issue. Some podcast publishers took to Twitter to express their frustration business implications of the outage, according to Verge.

Megaphone boasts more than 20,000 publishers and advertisers that use the platform.

The Spotify spokesperson said that the company is reaching out to the publishers that were impacted and told NPR they are working on safeguards to avoid this problem in the future. The outage did not just impact Spotify, but any publishers that use Megaphone to host their content.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Corrected: June 1, 2022 at 12:00 AM EDT
A previous version of this story said The Joe Rogan Experience was impacted by the disruption. In fact, it is not one of the podcasts that is a client of Megaphone, the platform that experienced an outage.
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Amina Kilpatrick
Amina Kilpatrick is an assistant engagement editor for the Newshub team distributing stories to Facebook, Twitter, third-party platforms and more.
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