Key Takeaways
- Google smart speakers inexplicably stopped responding to Spotify casting on October 24.
- Frantic reactions led to widespread troubleshooting and bug reports from affected users.
- Prompt acknowledgment and bug-fixing by Google developers averted a crisis for Spotify users.
Don’t let anybody — us included — tell you Google devs aren’t paying attention.
On October 24, Google Home developers felt a disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Google smart speakers suddenly glitched out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Or, they might have checked feedback from the Qualtrics-hosted Google bug report form (save that link for your own later use), or ran across a Reddit thread full of worried users. Because sometime around 15:00 UTC on October 24, countless Google smart speakers simply stopped acknowledging the Spotify app’s casting feature, refusing to begin playback and leaving the Spotify progress bar at a standstill.
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Frustrated users immediately took matters into their own hands refreshing, uninstalling, reinstalling, unlinking, linking, and cursing any and all devices within the network of Spotify, Google Home, and streaming device connections.
After exhausting the typical troubleshooting routine, devout Google Home followers took to the worldwide web, questioning life, Spotify, and Alphabet, Inc. as to why these things always seem to happen. The first explicit report hit the Nest Community platform at 15:17 UTC and garnered several quick replies. Additional alertsflooded in over the ensuing hours as music-deprived users raised the alarm from around the globe as to Google speakers’ refusal to reproduce audio streamed from Spotify. Spotify didn’t escape, either, as worried would-be listeners wondered on its community forum if the music service’s app was at fault, given the bug’s failure to mainfest via any other platform.
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Developers to the rescue
Ever vigilant, Google developers were on the case within an hour of the Reddit thread’s posting. Customer service informed the original poster posthaste that the issue was related to a Google Home app update, and the engineering team was hard at work on a fix.
It turns out that programmers at Big G must have been on to something. Starting around 12:00 UTC on October 25, frantic Nest Community posts slowed, DownDetector cooled off, and slowly but surely, suddenly relieved Spotify and Google speaker users trickled in to confirm that audio streaming was, in fact, working fine once again.
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Never one to leave the faithful behind, renowned community manager kelanfromgoogle reassured even the most recently distraught citizens of the bug’s acknowledgment and the attention it was actively receiving. Around that time, Spotify community moderator Maria also chimed in to point out the issue was smoothed out, at least on the back end.
Let this averted crisis go to show that few pleas are more effective than concerted bug feedback directed at one of the most popular, capable hardware and software dedvelopers in the world. Today, everyone wins. After rebooting their smart speaker and restarting Spotify.
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