Spotify’s recent sudden downtime may have been political payback, not just a routine outage

Last Tuesday, music fans looking for a little entertainment to get them though the afternoon ran into a slight hiccup: Spotify was suddenly unusable for many users. It took a few hours, but eventually the company was able to restore service later that day. On its own, that wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy; outages happen all the time. But as it turns out, this outage may have been the directly result of political activism.

According to a report prepared by the McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security, a pro-Iranian hacker organization known as the 313 Team has claimed responsibility for last week’s Spotify outage (via Tech Radar). The group posted that it had waged “a massive cyber attack targeting Spotify’s main servers,” with the DDoS attack ultimately resulting in the service disruptions we saw affecting users across around the globe.

Specifically, the 313 Team cited their action as revenge for the US assassinating Iranian ruler Ali Khamenei in late February.

Khamenei’s assassination was just the opening blow of the United States waging its illegal war with Iran, which was instigated without congressional approval. The ill-conceived military action has already had devastating international effects, displacing millions of civilians in the Middle East and sending global fuel prices into the stratosphere. If you’ve already been appropriately furious at the current US administration’s lack of empathy towards what all of us are paying at the gas pump, now you can add “ultimately responsible for recent Spotify outage” to its ever-growing list of crimes.