The Hits Keep On Coming for Sonos as ‘Major Outage’ Shuts Down Apple Music Integration
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The hits just keep coming for Sonos, and by hits, I don’t mean music, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s the Apple Music service. The company has confirmed that an ongoing “major outage” has made Apple Music unavailable via the Sonos app.
Sonos users on Reddit say they’re unable to access their Apple Music content library. Other users report being randomly signed out of their Apple Music account and not being able to sign back in. Many users report being impacted by the outage since Tuesday afternoon.
Sonos has confirmed the “major outage” on its system status page and says it’s working on a fix. However, the company hasn’t yet provided a timeline for when that fix will roll out.
We’ve identified a problem with Apple Music on Sonos and are working with them on a fix. You may not see all results while browsing Apple Music on the Sonos app until this is resolved.
All other features on the page show as “operational.”
Sonos integration with Apple Music allows users to access and play Apple Music content. The integration also offers support for viewing custom playlists, favorites, and more — well, except for the last day or so.
While there is a possibility that the problem could be on Apple’s end, the service is working just fine for everyone else.
This week’s “major outage” is just the latest of a series of problems that Sonos and its users have been forced to deal with.
In May, Sonos released a new version of its mobile app that proved to be less than popular among Sonos users. It was riddled with bugs and lacked several popular features that had been in the prior version. In September, Bloomberg took a deep dive into what went wrong with the app’s development, revealing that it launched prematurely despite pressure from numerous employees not to release it.
The Bloomberg report covered how Sonos was forced to release the new app alongside the launch of its Sonos Ace headphones because of “technical debt,” as it had allowed its tech to lag behind when it came to its app. When the company made a mid-2022 attempt to revamp its app, the company was forced to deal with ancient infrastructure, as well as code written in nearly obsolete programming languages. The app had been patched so many times that developers were forced to try and untangle a mess of spaghetti code to get things to work at all.
Instead of fixing the mess that was the old code, Sonos executives commanded developers to focus on new features. This led to infrastructure issues, as the news headphones required an overhauled Sonos app and an overhaul of the cloud infrastructure behind it.
While all this was happening, Sonos underwent some internal restructuring, including cutting costs by laying off staff. That caused chaos among the workers, as employees who had worked together for years were laid off or moved to other groups. The remaining employees attempted to push back, even resorting to “yelling and screaming” to prevent the new app from being released. However, at least one employee claims they didn’t push back as hard as they could have due to fears of also being shown the door.
Sonos has considered bringing the old app back. However, the company found that wouldn’t be an option, due to backend updates to cloud servers, as well as the software the speakers run.
