[Update: Acknowledged] Spotify Car Thing eligibility confirmation email leads to page saying that it's not available or Error 503? Here's what we know

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

Original story (published on June 15, 2021) follows:

Reports of a dedicated Spotify in-car player have been circulating for a couple of years now but it is only recently that the streaming service has actually begun to ship the cool piece of hardware.

Enter Spotify Car Thing which is a smart accessory that fills your car with music, news, entertainment, talk, and more. The device is undoubtedly meant to be an upgrade for older cars and does the job extremely well.

However, there are issues – not with Spotify Thing itself, but with those that are trying to get their hands on its limited stock.

A slew of recent complaints on Twitter and the official Spotify forums say that they’re unable to get Spotify Car Thing despite getting an email that says that they’re eligible for it.

@SpotifyCares I got an email saying I was eligible for a car thing and when I immediately tried to order, it said there were none available. Why am I being sent an email if there are none in stock?
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@SpotifyCares I just got my car thing email. But it says it’s’s sold out. Are there any other options here? Was really hoping to test this out and review! Thanks!
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The email contains a link that says “Get Car Thing”. However, clicking it is fruitless as it only directs peeps to a page that reads “Sorry, there aren’t any available Car Things at this time.”

But that’s not all. Some users don’t even get to see the ‘no Car Things available’ message and are instead fed an error that goes “Error 503 Backend fetch failed” or a page that asks users to take a “U-turn” as they’ve “hit a dead end”.

It can be said that the error is due to a server-side issue. But thankfully there is a workaround that seems to help.

Hey! I’m here to help. Could you try checking out Car Thing using a different browser or private window?
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There doesn’t seem to be any official acknowledgment from Spotify as of now but tweeting about it does result in a response from them asking complainants to DM. You are free to try your luck by doing the same.

Other than this, there really isn’t much to do other than waiting for Spotify to sort this mess out. Of course, we will continue tracking the matter for further developments so stay tuned to PiunikaWeb.

07:03 pm (IST): Spotify has now confirmed that they’re investigating the issue.

Hi there, thanks for the heads-up. We’re investigating this as we speak. If anything else comes up, just let us know /AK
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