Spotify the ad supported service that streams music for free, seems to be experiencing a major outage as I type. When I tried to connect to the service about half an hour ago it would not connect to the servers. Suspicious I searched Google and quickly came across lots of other people who are also experiencing similar issues.

After some reading it quickly become obvious that the Spotify service has gone down, even the official spotify.com website is down. Whether it's because of some catastrophic hardware failure or worse a malicious attack of some sort is unclear at this time.  Spotify have stated from their community support system  that they are "currently having network problems and are working on it as fast as we can to resolve it and get online again" and that the outage is affecting all users.

The reality of a cloud based service such as Spotify going down has hit home with many thousands of people today. Now I'm going away to load up foobar for the first time in months.

UPDATE: As previously thought, the outage has been confirmed as a "big one" at their London site, and sadly is not easy to put right again. Which could suggest that it maybe down for a while. A post by a Spotify representative on their support system has stated "As you notice we are still down. I'ts a big outage (as you probably figured) and unfortunately not easily fixed. Hang in there!".

UPDATE 2: Looks like after several hours of downtime, the Spotify team have resolved the problem(s). Spotify.com and the desktop client are back up and running although they both remain temperamental.