If Spotify wanted to be really sneaky, some amount of downtime might be good for them financially.

The bulk of their revenue comes from customers who subscribe on a per-month basis, while they pay out royalties on a per-song-played basis. This outage is reducing the amount they have to pay, and if the outage-elasticity-of-demand is low enough they could (hypothetically) come out ahead!

> while they pay out royalties on a per-song-played basis

I believe this is inaccurate. They pay out royalties on a share-of-all-plays basis, don't they?[0] So an outage wouldn't reduce the payout amount, it would just slightly alter the balance of payments for individual rightsholders.

[0]http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#royalties-i...: "That 70% is split amongst the rights holders in accordance with the popularity of their music on the service. The label or publisher then divides these royalties and accounts to each artist depending on their individual deals... Spotify does not calculate royalties based upon a fixed “per play” rate."

Rather, as they don't have SLA to end-users, they get credits from Google, so they still earn money.

But the reputation is damage.

I see your point. Based on @SpotifyStatus [0], it wasn't uncommon for Spotify to have service disruptions before they did the move though.

[0]: https://twitter.com/SpotifyStatus

I bet they and Google will have a positive post written up about it tomorrow though. :)

To be fair, AWS has some significant down time in the second half of last year.

Not across multiple regions though. It's not trivial to make an application cross region but at least there is a way to engineer around an outage, unlike this outage

I think it's a great idea to diversify not just regions, but providers.

The future is for per-application virtual networks that are agnostic to the underlying hosting provider. These networks work as an overlay, which means that your applications can be moved through providers without changing their architecture at all. You could even shut it down in provider A and start it in provider B without any changes at all.

At Wormhole[1] we have identified this problem and solved it.

[1]: https://wormhole.network

I was getting really frustrated at the gym when the Spotify app wouldn't work. Didn't expect to find the answer here.

And they won't be down again in a long, long time.

Was Google services (search, email, drives, apps) impacted at all?

Google Custom Search was down for a similar time period. (Outage lasted longer than GCE, but seems likely related.)

No they don't use gcloud to host their own apps. Yes that's ridiculous.

Which is exactly why I won't use GCE. If Google isn't confident enough to use it for themselves, neither will I.

The fact that Amazon dogfoods AWS is a major advantage for them.

Even if Amazon.com uses AWS (the extent of which seems it may be a mixture of marketing hype and urban legend), there are many ways AWS could fail that affects customers but leaves Amazon.com unaffected.

It would be hilarious if they use to host their services on AWS or Azure.

I remember people speculating that Spotify most likely received a big discount for doing this. Guess you get what you pay for ;)

Google provides 99.95% - https://cloud.google.com/appengine/sla

That is like 17 of such 15 minutes breaks per year, i.e. an allowance for one small (or a large fixed quickly) screwdup/month :)

99.95% is correct, but the Compute Engine SLA is actually here: https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla

Today's incident did not impact App Engine at all.

(Disclaimer: I work in Google Cloud Support.)

This allows unlimited small outages:

"Downtime Period" means, for an Application, a period of five consecutive minutes of Downtime. Intermittent Downtime for a period of less than five minutes will not be counted towards any Downtime Periods.

It seems to be working fine, I just tested.

Outage lasted about 16 minutes

Happy to say I didn't notice; I am using a 517 song offlined playlist ("EVE Online" by Michael Andrew) for my programming work.

That sounds awesome, care to share?

Sorry late - link is https://open.spotify.com/user/1231239981/playlist/3ka1SYnv2b... . Hope you see this post and enjoy it.

I see from the down votes that my reply must have been seen as kind of off topic to the GCE issue, however since Spotify came up as a "victim", I did feel it prudent to mention that Spotify Premium has offline playlists to allow users to weather network issues of any kind. Also for me personally, big playlists of quality music like this one is fantastic for my work.