{"id":12799,"date":"2020-08-21T09:58:50","date_gmt":"2020-08-21T13:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thesslstore.com\/blog\/?p=12799"},"modified":"2023-04-10T18:05:15","modified_gmt":"2023-04-10T22:05:15","slug":"the-day-the-music-died-certificate-expiration-takes-down-spotify","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thesslstore.com\/blog\/the-day-the-music-died-certificate-expiration-takes-down-spotify\/","title":{"rendered":"The Day the Music Died: Certificate Expiration Takes Down Spotify"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cSomething expired deep inside
The day the music died\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier this week, the music streaming service Spotify went down for about an hour. (We \u201cheard it from a friend who heard it from another<\/em>\u201d\u2026on Twitter.) All signs point towards a certificate expiration being the root cause of the downtime. So, what happened to take Spotify offline? And what does an hour of downtime add up to for Spotify?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s hash it out.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n<\/span><\/span>\n\n\n

Spotify Fans Cry A River on Twitter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As usually happens when a popular internet services goes down, many people \u201cHeard It Through the Grapevine<\/em>\u201d on Twitter. Starting around 8AM EST on August 19th<\/sup> Spotify users started posting on Twitter saying they couldn\u2019t access the service:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Twitter:<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As always, many of the Tweets were pretty funny. (Hey, if there\u2019s no music\u2026you may as well enjoy some Twitter comedians!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Spotify<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Checking<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Of course, a few fans of competing services took the opportunity to throw some shade at Spotify:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Spotify<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In short, Twitter lived up to its reputation as the best downtime monitor in the world \u2013 up to the minute status information and as an added bonus, you might get a laugh from all the salty posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About an hour and a half later, Spotify announced that everything was back up and running normally:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Spotify<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What Caused Spotify to Go Down?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Spotify doesn\u2019t appear to have made an official announcement explaining the technical details of what happened. But once again, Twitter comes to the rescue with the details. Louis Poinsignon, a Network Engineer at Cloudflare, seems to have sleuthed out the issue:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"SSL<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The certificate expired at 12 PM GMT, which was 8AM US Eastern Time, just a few minutes before the tweets from music-deprived users started rolling in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Big of a Deal was this Certificate Expiration?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Here at Hashed Out, we\u2019ve occasionally highlighted the consequences of letting a certificate expire<\/a>. Here are a few of the incidents we\u2019ve examined before:<\/p>\n\n\n\n