[Updated] Podcasts not working or playing on Spotify, Apple Music, & Google Podcasts for many (workaround inside)

Here’s the crux of the article in video form:

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….

Original story (published on May 31, 2022) follows:

Many podcast listeners have taken to social platforms such as Twitter and Reddit to report that they aren’t able to listen to their favorite podcasts since apps such as Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Podcasts are not working or aren’t playing the podcasts.

Affected users are getting either an ‘Episode Unavailable’ error message or the podcast just doesn’t play or gets stuck on loading.

We’ve added a few reports below for reference:

@Spotify podcasts are not playing on the phone or pc app both are updated. songs play but no podcasts at all. is tried reinstalling both and didn’t work on either. gotta be something on your guys’ end (Source)

@DarthAmin @talkhoops @CornPuzzle y’all know what’s up with cinephobe not playing on Spotify and Google podcasts? (Source)

why is spotify podcasts not working (Source)

The issue has seemingly been on for at least a couple of hours at the time of this writing and there does not appear to be any official statement regarding the outage from Spotify, Google, or Apple.

In some cases, certain individuals can play some podcasts but certain episodes don’t play. In other cases, users aren’t able to play any podcasts at all.

That said, there’s one workaround for the time being that might do the trick for you in case you aren’t able to listen to podcasts on Apple Music, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

You can head over to YouTube to listen to podcasts that have been uploaded to the video-sharing site. Of course, platform-exclusive podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience won’t be available on YouTube.

It’s unclear how long it will take for the issue to be resolved but we do suspect that it will be addressed sooner rather than later.

That said, we’ll keep track of the situation and will post an update to this story if and when we come across any further developments.

Update 1 (September 2, 2022)

12:44 pm (IST): Many Spotify subscribers are now reporting that podcasts are not working for them across all platforms including desktop, mobile, and the web player.

Luckily, Spotify support has acknowledged this issue and said that they are currently investigating it.

Featured image source: Spotify

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