Podcast fans experienced discomfort because Megaphone, the platform which hosts podcasts was down. Spotify acquired Megaphone a while back and hosts many of its podcasts on the platform.
An expired SSL certificate caused the outage due to which the service was down for more than eight hours. Megaphone serves as a hosting solution for many podcast platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and many more brands.
While the issue was minuscule, an expired SSL certificate, it took a while to fix it. Many podcasters witnessed a loss in viewership due to the hosting platform being down.
When did the Megaphone outage occur?
Podnews reported that Megaphone was down at 8 PM ET on Monday. It took a while for the company to acknowledge the issue. Even after Megaphone came back online, it took almost four hours for the services to resume to normal.
Usually, an SSL certificate is valid for 13 months but Megaphone obtained it for two years. It seems to be an uncommon case of oversight by the site administrators. The hosting platform claimed at 9:45 AM that the issue was permanently resolved.
“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.” Spotify spokesperson Erin Styles said in the official statement.
According to The Verge, Spotify acquired Megaphone for $235 million in 2020. It was because of the vision to build a podcast tech stack. It hosts podcasts, allows users to listen to and download them, and offers analytical tools for the user.
