1 June, San Francisco Podcast listeners were unable to access many of their episodes for more than eight hours this week due to an outage on Megaphone, a podcast hosting platform owned by Spotify
The outage was caused by the company’s failure to renew Megaphone’s security certificate, according to The Verge.
In a statement, Spotify spokesperson Erin Styles said, “Megaphone experienced a platform outage owing to an issue with our SSL certificate.”
“Clients were unable to access the Megaphone CMS during the downtime, and podcast listeners were unable to download podcast episodes hosted by Megaphone. Since then, megaphone service has been restored “Styles have been added.
According to the report, it was a simple oversight that had far-reaching 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. According to the article, Megaphone hosts several of Spotify’s own licensed and owned Programmes.
According to Styles, the corporation is in contact with the affected publishers.
Spotify paid $235 million for Megaphone in December 2020, making it the streamer’s most expensive acquisition in its effort to establish a comprehensive podcasting tech stack.
Why Megaphone’s SSL certificate was allowed to expire and why it took so long to fix was unknown to Spotify. According to Podnews, the certificate expired at 8 p.m. ET on Monday. According to the platform’s status page, the problem was not resolved for another eight hours.
Podcasters encountered delays with the Megaphone CMS even after it was restored just before 6 a.m. ET. The problem had been repaired as of 9:45 a.m., according to the business.