My son's account vanished but couldn't re-register

[cjw296]

Plan

Premium family

Country

UK

Device

iPad Pro

Operating System

Latest iOS

My Question or Issue

My son uses the Spotify iOS app on only one device: an iPad. We've added his user onto our family plan (set up under my wife's username).

Twice now, my son has just been spontaneously logged out and his username and password stopped working.

The second time, attempting the account recovery process gave:

 

...which is a lie 😉 Attempting to re-register the account gave:

 

Much annoyance on a chat with Spotify "customer service" got the account re-enabled, but it had dropped off our family plan.

When pressed on what had happened, all the offered was "security reasons".

Now, my son's password comes from a password manager and is auto-generated, his email address isn't anywhere public; https://haveibeenpwned.com/ returns no results.

Has anyone else had this happen? 

Any patterns anyone's spotted that cause this erroneous behaviour?

[Dessi]

Hi there @cjw296,

Thanks for reaching out and welcome to the Spotify Community!

There are a lot of patterns, which may lead to an account getting blocked. We aren't able to share them all due to security reasons, but some of them are VPN usage and excessive streaming, for example. 

If you continue to get an error message that the email address/username isn't linked to an account when attempting to log in, but you also aren't able to sign up with this email address because it says that an account is already linked to it, then this means that the account is blocked. You can check this article for some more useful information on the topic.

Hope this clears things up.

[cjw296]

None of us use any VPNs and I'd be very surprised if anything considered "excessive streaming" was happening.

Also note that at no point did we get an explicit error message that the account was disabled, just the weird pattern of trying to recover password but being told the account didn't exist, but getting told the email address was in-use when we tried to re-register.

I'm afraid your comment doesn't clear anything up.

[Joan]

Hi @cjw296,

Thanks for the reply.

When you have this behaviour where it says that an account still exists with a given email but logging into it doesn't work, this is usually the case when the account is disabled/blocked. This means it still exists, but logging into it ins't possible. As @Dessi explained, an account can be disabled for many reasons and partially due to security concerns but mainly because we here on the Community cannot access user accounts directly, we cannot state exactly why this has happened.

In any case, please check out the provided article, which includes both more information on this phenomenon and more importantly the steps on how the account can be recovered.

Hope this helps.