A simple, yet easily avoidable mistake at Spotify has taken the company’s hosted podcasts offline. The error: A lapsed SSL certificate preventing secure connections from being made with the server.
The Verge received comment from Spotify spokesperson Erin Styles:
“Megaphone experienced a platform outage due to an issue related to our SSL certificate, During the outage, clients were unable to access the Megaphone CMS and podcast listeners were unable to download podcast episodes from Megaphone-hosted publishers. Megaphone service has since been restored.”
For the company, this would have a far deeper impact than just the time taken to rectify the issue. Megaphone dynamically inserts advertising into streams, which, without active streams would affect income significantly. One this is almost certain, there will be better oversight and planning into the — usually manual — process to review the certificate in the future.
