Spotify has good news if your audiobooks suddenly stopped playing

Spotify has been steadily adding more reasons to spend time with audiobooks, from narrated magazine articles to TV-style recaps and Playlist Notes. But today, some listeners were unable to play those audiobooks at all, and Spotify now says the problem has been fixed.

The issue surfaced earlier today, with Reddit reports coming from users across phones, desktops, and the web. Spotify acknowledged the problem through its Community forum, saying it had received reports that audiobook playback was not working properly and that the relevant teams were working on a fix.

Spotify has now changed the incident’s status to Fixed, saying the problem should now be resolved for everyone and advising users to make sure they have the latest version of the app.

Some users have confirmed that their audiobooks started working again. One Reddit user who had been unable to play chapters said the problem appeared to resolve itself. Another reported that their audiobook was working again after it had previously gotten stuck. However, other users said they were still unable to play audiobooks across multiple devices and platforms.

The symptoms were also varied. Some listeners said playback would start loading and then immediately stop, while others saw Spotify rapidly skip through chapter after chapter without playing anything. One user said they couldn’t even download an audiobook, with the app stuck showing an endless loading indicator.

That makes it difficult to say whether Spotify’s fix is still rolling out, whether the underlying issue hasn’t been completely resolved, or whether some users are encountering a separate problem. Spotify hasn’t provided technical details about what caused the outage or how it was fixed.

For now, the best course of action is to update Spotify and try playback again. If audiobooks still aren’t working, Spotify is asking affected users to start a new thread in the Help board rather than continuing to post in the now-closed incident thread.

If you’re still having trouble, keep reporting it. Spotify clearly has the issue on its radar, and continued reports could help establish whether today’s fix has actually reached everyone.