Temporary “service outages” are relatively common. Spotify, Google, Facebook… Virtually all online services have had to claim that their commitment to online stability is 99.99% of cases, with a modest but very recurring 0.01% of cases to justify such a decline. In other words, a service that is going through a temporary outage is understandable and not particularly interesting.

But there are exceptions that catch our eye, as they are a reminder of the importance of certain procedures and operations, which may seem harmless. Something that serves both those who feel its consequences and those who are responsible for similar tasks, so that similar events do not happen again. And, by the way, it also points out that the management of the company in question, in this case Spotify, has certain gaps.

If you are a Spotify user and you usually use the service to listen to podcasts You may have had problems accessing any of this content from last night until this morning. Specifically, these are podcasts that use Megaphone, a podcast publishing platform acquired by Spotify in 2020 that allows creators to distribute and monetize their content, which is distributed not only on Spotify but also through other services.

The problem that has already been solved is that according to what we can read in The Verge the company forgot to renew the SSL certificate necessary for the normal operation of the service. Once it expired, at two o’clock in the morning (Peninsular Spanish Time), it took the company another hour to rebuild, so it took about eight hours for both podcast publishing and management features to return to work normally.

During those hours users of Spotify and other services connected to Megaphone could not download the contentwhich could translate into spectator and economic losses for its creators, who with some surprise observed incomprehensible (though not unprecedented, it must also be said) neglect of non-renewal of the certificate, either automatically or manually, for which you would expect the responsible person to be have some comment.

Podcasts are a key element for Spotify, to the extent that it seems to devote more effort and investment to them than musical content, which is the original reason for the service. A legitimate and understandable strategy, but all the more surprising, is that their availability has been affected due to oversights like this.