Did Taylor Swift Break Spotify?—Brief Outage at Midnight for Album Drop

Photo Credit: Spotify

Did Taylor Swift break Spotify? — Short answer: kinda. The music streaming service experienced brief interruptions at midnight as Swifties rushed to the platform to hear The Tortured Poets Department.Spotify quickly came back online, but a peek at this graph from Down Detector shows the service is experiencing intermittent issues throughout the day. The huge spike in the graph that happens around 9 pm PST coincides with midnight ET, which is when the album dropped. All of the excitement around the new album means coverage has been wall to wall—but this isn’t even the first time Taylor has broken Spotify.

Photo Credit: Down Detector

When the singer released her re-recorded 1989 (Taylor’s Version) in October 2023, Spotify had trouble keeping up then, too. Spotify also experienced technical issues with the release of Midnights in October 2022—suggesting the sheer star-power Swift commands creates a spike in demand that is hard on even the most robust cloud servers.

Taylor Swift surprised fans with The Anthology collection dropping at 2 am, which includes a second album worth of songs. That’s a total of 31 new Taylor Swift songs dropped for fans to enjoy. “It’s a 2 am surprise—The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album,” the singer wrote on social media about the surprise release. Spotify handled that better, though outage reports did increase as fans discovered the extra songs.“I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past two years and wanted to share it with all of you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology,” Swift continues in her post. “15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore—it’s all yours.”

Fans have been clamoring for the music since a Taylor Swift leak yesterday resulted in several of the songs being passed around the internet. Swifties fell into two camps with the leak—those who listened immediately and those who chastised the listeners for not being ‘real fans.’