Is Snapchat down? Why Snapchat isn't working - and is Spotify down too?

Snapchat is down for thousands of users worldwide as a reported outage sees Snapchatters unable to send Snaps or log back in to the app
Is Snapchat down? Why Snapchat isn't working - and is Spotify down too? (Image credit: Canva Pro)Is Snapchat down? Why Snapchat isn't working - and is Spotify down too? (Image credit: Canva Pro)
Is Snapchat down? Why Snapchat isn't working - and is Spotify down too? (Image credit: Canva Pro)

The app with over 265 million users worldwide appears to have been hit with another outage, as thousands of users reported the app being ‘down’ and not letting them log into their accounts on the photosharing app on Tuesday evening.

As of 5.50pm on Tuesday evening, Down Detector saw a spike in reports of Snapchat not working.

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Snapchat’s outage comes after a series of glitches and outages on the app were brought into larger resonance by the extended outage suffered by Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram in early October.

But on Tuesday both Snapchat and music streaming platform Spotify appeared to have been affected by an outage, according to user reports flagged to Down Detector.

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Here’s what we know so far about why Snapchat is down and why Spotify isn’t working.

Is Snapchat down?

At 5.50pm on 16 November, Down Detector – a site which allows users to report outages on popular websites, apps and technologies – registered over 48,000 reports from users saying that the app was ‘down’ and not working.

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64% of these reports said the app itself was not working, while 19% reported issues with posting and another 16% claimed to have seen issues when trying to log in to the app.

On Twitter, the bulk of complaints appeared to be over being unable to log in to the app and send Snaps to other users.

The reason for Snapchat’s outage is not yet known, but Snapchat developers are aware of the issue.

The Snapchat Support Twitter account tweeted at 6.12pm in response to complaints and alerts from users on the social media platform about the outage.

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“Many Snapchatters are having trouble using the app,” wrote @SnapchatSupport.

"Hang tight, we're working on a fix In the meantime, we recommend staying logged in.”

Why is Snapchat not working?

The current Snapchat outage appears to be less severe than other down periods experienced by users of the app in the past.

Outages seem to be affecting a range of different sites and apps including Discord, Etsy, Pokemon Go and more due to Google Cloud issues.

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The tech giant’s cloud computing product suite was still registering a number of service disruptions and outages for services such as Google Cloud Networking as of 7pm, according to its status dashboard.

Similar issues have plagued sites and apps over the past year, most memorably seen in June this year as sites went down when content delivery network Fastly was hit by glitches.

Is Spotify down?

As one of the world’s largest music and audio streaming platforms, Spotify does not often suffer outages or go down.

But as Snapchat users reported issues with accessing the app and its features, 16,374 reports were logged with Down Detector to report similar issues for Spotify at just prior to 6pm.

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Again, users reported down issues were mostly associated with the app – as 52% of reports on Down Detector registered.

However, 33% of reports also identified the website as where they have seen issues over the last hour or so.

What did Spotify say about its services being down?

The Spotify Status team also took to social media on Tuesday night to respond to a slew of comments and complaints about the app outage this evening, with users unable to access playlists and tracks on the app and continually receiving ‘something went wrong’ pop-ups.

The app’s support team tweeted at 5.57pm on Tuesdayy: “We’re aware of some issues right now and are checking them out!

"We’ll keep you posted.”

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