This is what we know after the versions of a possible cyber attack

Have you tried to listen to your uslist always this Wednesday and did not carry? It was not your mobile or your connection: Spotify has once again suffered a generalized fall that has affected users in different parts of the world. The streaming platform, usually stable, He already lived an important interruption at the end of September last yearwhen both their website and the player stopped working for several hours.

Problems with Spotify. According to Downdetectorthe interruption of the service began shortly before 15:00 (Spanish peninsular time). As usually happens in these cases, X quickly filled with user messages that sought to confirm the failureshare your frustration or simply understand what was happening. They pointed out that the service did not work both in applications and in its web version.

Cyber ​​attack versions. Shortly after the failures began, Hackmanac (@h4ckmanac) He echoed an alleged claim by a group called Dark Storm. According to this versionthe interruption was caused by an attack of denial of service (DDOS), which the apparent attackers sell to interested parties. At no time was data theft or a larger scale infiltration.

The message posted by the alleged group of attackers

A DDOS attack (distributed denial of service) blocks a service by launching thousands or millions of simultaneous connections from different points. The objective is not to steal information, but to prevent legitimate users from accessing. It is a form of digital sabotage that, in many cases, can be rented or purchased in the Dark Web.

Spotify denies a cyber attack. The Swedish company was clear about it: “The reports that it is a security attack are false,” published in x. On their community page, they added that their technical team continued to investigate the situation and that they were aware of the failures that were affecting the service. Of course, they did not offer details about the origin of the problem.

The service returns to normal. After 6:00 p.m. the official Spotify status account again publishedthis time with an encouraging news for users: “Everything in order. Thank you for your patience. If you still have problems, contact @spotifycares.” The company offered no more explanations, and the question about what could have happened is still in the air.

Services can fall for several reasons. In an increasingly connected world, that a platform like Spotify suffers an interruption does not automatically mean that it is being a victim of a cyber attack. In fact, in many cases, the origin of these failures is much more everyday: human errors, routine updates or simple configuration problems that are more complicated than expected.

One of the most common causes are errors in content distribution systems (CDN) or domain name resolution (DNS) services. When they have problems, the user can find that the application does not load, the music does not reproduce or directly cannot log in. On other occasions, a bad configuration of the servers or a defective deployment can leave an entire platform out of service.

It may also happen that the entire system works correctly … until an unexpected traffic peak arrives. If the infrastructure is not prepared to manage an avalanche of simultaneous users, the result are intermittent errors, slowness or even a total fall of the service. Although, it should be noted, the latter can also occur precisely by an attack of denial of service.

Images | Spotify | Screen capture

In Xataka | What is cloudflare, how it works and why a fall or block makes half the Internet fail

In Xataka | Agents are the great promise of AI. They also aim to become the new favorite weapon of cybercounts