Due to an outage on Megaphone, a podcast hosting platform owned by Spotify, podcast listeners were unable to access many of their favorite episodes for more than eight hours on Monday night and early Tuesday morning. The failure to renew Megaphone’s security certificate caused the outage.
Spotify representative Erin Styles said in a statement, “Megaphone experienced a platform outage owing to an issue with our SSL certificate. Clients were unable to access the Megaphone CMS during the outage, and podcast listeners were unable to download podcast episodes from Megaphone-hosted publishers. Since then, megaphone service has been restored.”
It’s a simple error with serious consequences. Many of the industry’s top shows are hosted by Megaphone, which inserts dynamic commercials throughout episodes. It also makes shows available on platforms other than Spotify, such as Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. On Megaphone, Spotify presents a number of its own licensed and own shows. Styles stated that the corporation is contacting concerned publishers.
Spotify paid $235 million for Megaphone in December 2020, making it the streamer’s largest buy-in in its effort to establish a comprehensive podcasting tech stack (in comparison, it paid around $150 million for Anchor). The solution enables the corporation to profit from podcast listening that occurs on competing platforms. Spotify has since expanded Megaphone by acquiring and integrating analytics products Podsights and Chartable, as well as radio-to-podcast tool Whooshkaa.
Spotify declined to comment on why Megaphone’s SSL certificate was allowed to expire and why it took so long to resolve. According to reports, the certificate expired on Monday at 8 p.m. ET. According to the platform’s status page, the problem was not resolved for another eight hours. Even after Megaphone was restored soon before 6 a.m. ET, podcasters encountered problems with the Megaphone CMS. The business stated that the problem had been rectified as of 9:45 a.m.
