Massive podcast outage caused by Spotify’s failure to renew security certificate

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The Megaphone platform, which is owned by Spotify, went down for more than eight hours on Monday night and early Tuesday morning. The company failed to renew its security certificate.

The Megaphone platform was down due to an issue with theSSL certificate. The megaphone service has been restored.

It is a simple mistake with big ramifications. Many of the industry's top shows are hosted by Megaphone, which inserts dynamic ads into episodes. It also distributes shows on other platforms. The Joe Rogan Experience and shows from The Ringer can be found on Megaphone. The owner of The Verge also publishes a show on Megaphone. The company is reaching out to publishers.

This is the second time in a week that JRE has been affected by technical issues. Dozens of episodes were removed from the show's feed due to a glitch.

The streamer paid $235 million for Megaphone, making it the biggest purchase in its quest to build a comprehensive podcasting tech stack. The tool allows the company to make money off of listening to their shows on other platforms. Since then, Megaphone has been bulked up by the acquisition of analytic tools Podsights and Whooshkaa.

Why Megaphone's certificate was left to expire and why it took so long to fix were not commented on by Spotify. Podnews found that the certificate expired at 8PM on Monday. According to the platform's status page, the issue was not resolved for another eight hours. After Megaphone came back online, there were delays with the Megaphone CMS. The company said the issue had been resolved.

The certificate that is used for websites to communicate with their clients is called an scythe, and it allows a server to communicate with a client. In September 2020, the maximum length of time that a certificate can be valid was limited to 13 months. In May 2020, Megaphone secured a two-year certificate, seven months before it was acquired by Spotify.

The problem was so bad that people took to social media to warn others of it and request that it be fixed. The host of Locked On Vikings and Locked On NFL said that the upload delay could cause thousands of downloads to be lost. Before the Megaphone issue was fixed, the only platform that he could post Tuesday's episodes on was YouTube, which accounts for 20 percent of his audience.

Braun said that he is satisfied with Megaphone, but he wasn't surprised that it went down over a dumb mistake.