Spotify still hasn’t fully reigned in all of its issues with malicious attacks on users’ computers. Since June, Spotify’s applications on Windows, Mac, and Linux have been writing exorbitant amounts of data to user devices, which comes with some heavy consequences.
Users have reported tens and hundreds of gigabytes worth of data being written to their device in under an hour, while occasionally the amount of data written ventures into the realm of terabytes. This persistent bug is causing real damage to hard drives, especially solid state drives which have limited data writing capacity, which could result in years being needlessly removed from their expected life.
“This is a major bug that currently affects thousands of users. If for example, Castrol Oil lowered your engine’s life expectancy by five to 10 years, I imagine most users would want to know, and that fact should be reported on.”
According to Ars Technica, these results are quite reproducible, and their findings were spot on with user reports.
“Typically, the app wrote from 5 to 10 GB of data in less than an hour on Ars reporters’ machines, even when the app was idle. Leaving Spotify running for periods longer than a day resulted in amounts as high as 700 GB.”
Spotify says that this immense bug has been fixed for the latest version 1.0.42, which is in the process of becoming available to the platform’s worldwide user base in the coming days.
H/T ARS Technica