Spotify brought to its knees by air con failure

Spotify, the truly awesome music streaming program, have announced why their service was out of bounds for several hours at the weekend. Server failure? A hacking attempt? No, the air conditioning.

Spotify users were frustrated to discover that they couldn’t listen to music like normal, with constant 'offline' messages displayed despite users being clearly online. The company has now explained just what was going on at their London data centre to cause the fault.

“On Saturday evening there was a power outage at a large data site in London where we host some of our servers. The backup power kicked in as planned, however, one of the big air conditioners in the data centre did not start properly. Heat is a major issue in large data centres and without this cooling unit the temperature rose very quickly and our servers shut down to protect themselves from over heating.”

This is far from the first time that air conditioning faults have brought down web services (a similar problem affected Last.fm last year, for example). However, it’s a reminder of just how fragile the web services we rely on truly are. To avoid any air con faults ensure that you use an air conditioning service as often as possible!