Spotify says it's back after an outage of several hours

Spotify is back up and running, the music streaming giant has announced after it was hit with a service outage which left thousands of users unable to stream music.

The platform gave the "all clear" about three hours after it first announced that it was aware people were experiencing "issues".

Spotify denied its service outage was the result of a "security hack".

Just after 2am AEST, the company posted on X: "All clear - thanks for your patience."

Earlier, thousands of users reported being unable to stream music via Spotify online, with audio already downloaded to a user's library only being accessible.

According to service monitoring site Downdetector, problems began at Spotify about 10pm AEST on Wednesday, with more than 20,000 reports of user issues with the service being logged afterwards.

It said users were reporting problems with both the Spotify app and website.

In its initial statement on the issue posted to X, Spotify said: "We're aware of some issues right now and are checking them out."

In an update afterwards, the company said reports of the outage being a security breach were "false".

In February, the Sweden-based firm announced its user numbers had hit a record high of 675 million globally, a rise of 12 per cent over the last year.

This includes 263 million subscribers across more than 180 markets, it said.

with AP