topic Re: API Throwing 500 and 401 errors in Spotify for Developers

API Throwing 500 and 401 errors

Inzanity — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:56:58 GMT

Hi,

I’m seeing severe, ongoing failures on the Player API today (2026-07-21). This is from a my desktop app using the Web API with PKCE, a Premium account, and scopes that include playback state (user-read-playback-state, etc.). A lot of my userbase has also reported these issues.

What works
Authorization / token refresh succeed (PKCE).
After login, /v1/me works — we correctly get the user and product: premium.

What fails (repeatedly)
GET /v1/me/player (currently-playing / playback state)
Often returns 401 with body:

{
"error": {
"status": 401,
"message": "Access token missing"
}
}

This happens immediately after a successful login/token refresh, so it does not look like a normal expired-token case (we would expect something like “The access token expired”, not “Access token missing”).

GET /v1/me/player/queue
Frequently returns 500:

{
"error": {
"status": 500,
"message": "Server error."
}
}

These two errors often alternate on consecutive poll cycles (every few seconds).

Is there a known Player API incident right now (esp. /v1/me/player and /v1/me/player/queue)?

Has anyone else seen 401 "Access token missing" on player endpoints while /v1/me still works with the same access token?

Are the generic 500 "Server error." responses on Get Queue expected under load, or is that a backend fault we should treat as an outage?

I even managed to get 500 response on the API Reference Page.

Thanks!

Re: API Throwing 500 and 401 errors

thlucas — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:38:07 GMT

Same here! I am also seeing sporadic "403 - Player command failed: Premium required" messages for Spotify Web API calls made (using a premium account of course). Note that an immediate subsequent call works fine with the exact same web request (e.g. same endpoint, Authorization token, and parameters).

I have not seen any "500 - Server errors" as of yet.

Functionality that has been working fine for years is now failing sporadically!

I had to add "retry" logic to get around these errors for now. The question is what else is going to crop up?!

C'mon Spotify - you can do better!

Re: API Throwing 500 and 401 errors

wolfgang_bures — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 21:22:45 GMT

Yes, same here. ALl of the above. Server_Errors, Token missing, premium required. It sucks so much

Re: API Throwing 500 and 401 errors

KMatuszak — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:23:27 GMT

I’ve come to accept 5xx errors as the norm here, and honestly, it’s not even worth complaining about anymore—I had to build a retry loop into my API just to spam requests until I finally get a non-5xx response. But randomly getting 401 errors with a freshly generated token is a new one. Can confirm this issue is happening.

Re: API Throwing 500 and 401 errors

Spotawntae — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 23:31:25 GMT

Currently getting 401 "Access token missing" repeatedly, in between successful requests. Earlier I also got a 400 "Refresh token expired" followed by "Refresh token revoked" on subsequent attempts and had to reauthorize to recover.

Re: API Throwing 500 and 401 errors

Mordicus — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:03:41 GMT

Same but different for me, I was getting 403 + "Insufficient client scope" despite having the appropriate scopes

Added some more code to basically ignore 403s with that error message and retry them.

Curious to know why the API returns these incorrect response codes.

Re: API Throwing 500 and 401 errors

wolfgang_bures — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:48:51 GMT

Seems solved?

Re: API Throwing 500 and 401 errors

Inzanity — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:47:04 GMT

@wolfgang_bures wrote:
Seems solved?

Seems like it. Not seeing errors anymore