v1/me/following getting 403s all of a sudden

[shlkm]

Context: app is > 5 years old, thousands of users, no code change recently.

For an extremely large portion of users, I'm getting a 403 Forbidden response when I hit the v1/me/following endpoint. This seems to have started yesterday and is practically happening for all users.

The app has the correct scopes, I'm 100% certain. A lot of those users have been on the app and connected Spotify for months. As I said, nothing in the app code has changed, let alone in the authorization flow.

[shlkm]

After some manual debugging, I found out that the problem is intermittent: the same exact request with the same token and everything will succeed multiple times, but then fail multiple times as well. I've tried this both the "after" and "limit" params, and without them. It seems that the API is currently unstable but I'm a bit alarmed there has been no announcement or public posts regarding this.

[cjtolj]

I am also having this same issue right now. App has been working forever, suddenly stops.

I'm using the Spotipy library for Python and the error is:

requests.exceptions.HTTPError: 403 Client Error: Forbidden for url: https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/following/contains?ids=ARTIST_ID&type=artist

---

spotipy.exceptions.SpotifyException: http status: 403, code:-1 - https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/following/contains?ids=ARTIST_ID&type=artist:
None, reason: None

I am not experiencing it intermittently though but consistently.

[Tim651]

I have having the same random 403 errors. Am using https://api.spotify.com/v1/ as base URI. This is my query var url = $"search?q={searchText}&type={types}"; It works only once in a while. 

[GDJ1]

My app has been running without issue and no code changes in over a year. I started seeing 403s this morning. Using Python and Spotipy. It is inconsistent for me, sometimes it will work, sometimes it errors out.

SpotifyException (requests.exceptions.HTTPError: 403 Client Error: Forbidden for url: https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/following?type=artist&limit=25&after=0rFHElzeddB9ymDjgpBENX:None, reason: None

[Morganic1]

I'm getting a lot of 401's randomly, one call will to get e.g. the songs in the user's library will work for the access token, then the next one will just return 401. The access token is of course not expired.

This has not been an issue for 2 years. It seemed to start on the 8/8/2024. 

[cjtolj]

Following what some other users have said I've implemented a retry with delay in my app that seems to fix the issue. I was getting 403's constantly, but I guess that was because my code is designed to iterate over items in my release radar, make a request per track to see if I'm following any of those artists before deciding to save the track or not, then going to the next track. So basically no time at all until the next request to check if I'm following more artists.

My code below using Spotipy with Python. 5 second delay seems to have worked, might need some tweaking. I did continue to get intermittent errors with a 3 second delay. It's only in the event that it fails once does it delay, so I might actually make it 10 seconds and then once Spotify actually fix the issue then that code won't even be executed so it won't matter.

Hope this helps anyone else.

def current_user_following_artists(spotify_connection, artist_ids):
    try:
        return spotify_connection.current_user_following_artists(artist_ids)
    except:
        logging.warn("An error occured requesting the current users' following artists. Retrying...")
        logging.debug("Imposing artificial delay on request for following artists (due to Spotofy 403 quirk).")
        time.sleep(5)
        logging.debug("Proceeding...")
        return spotify_connection.current_user_following_artists(artist_ids)

[Morganic1]

While that's a neat workaround, it's not really addressing the core issue. 

The issue started as I stated on the 8/8/2024, I hope Spotify will be able to look into this.

[Morganic1]

Is this the correct board to report bugs, btw? It doesn't seem that Spotify is monitoring this forum anymore.

[cjtolj]

Then don't use it. I'm not a Spotify dev, I just posted what helped me - I even said it won't be useful once Spotify fix the issue.

Why would you even reply like you did?

[Morganic1]

To make sure that this problem gets some actual attention, and isn't seen by Spotify as something that can be fixed on our end.

[cjtolj]

Right. Because they care about you. Got it.

[Morganic1]

Seems to fixed as of 8:50 UTC this morning.

[jakubito]

It has not been fixed, still getting 403 when hitting "v1/me/following". Sometimes it fails on the very first request (without "after" parameter), other times it fails on a random subsequent call

[Morganic1]

Sorry, the issue with 401 being returned haphazardly that started on the 8/8/2024 has been fixed 8:50 UTC this morning. I thought the two issues were related.

[cjtolj]

This ticket is about the 403 error.... It's in the title

[turobiter]

any updates on this? my app is new, but am having the same issue. I get this error:

2024-08-15T15:31:57.140700+00:00 app[web.1]: HTTP Error for GET to https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/ with Params: {} returned 403 due to Check settings on developer.spotify.com/dashboard, the user may not be registered.

Oddly, the app works perfectly fine for me when I login. But hits an error when others try. 

[Naianasha]

+1 I'm getting this intermittently as well... 

[Fihlvein]

Oh come on it's been a week now and this sudden API issue is still present! Prices go up and I can't even enjoy new music release list through API due to this issue. There are other reports of likely the same issue and we are not getting any update on the matter. The workaround above, while helps to some extent, still gives very unreliable results through API.

[blackarcanis]

The same. I'm getting that error from time to time while never getting such an error for years (and nothing has changed in my code).