Just over eight hours after launching — and less than a minute after Jaden Smith called into the live show to request the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme song (and it was played, multiple times) — Beats 1 radio seems to have gone down. Trying to access Apple Music's flagship live radio show right now is instead giving various messages of "unknown error occurred" when trying to access it through the Apple Music app (the Beats 1 stream via iTunes isn't responding, either).
Update 9:06PM ET: After just over 30 minutes of downtime, Beats 1 radio is back up with Ariana Grande's "Love Me Harder."
Up until this point, Beats 1 radio has been running fairly smoothly (user experience oddities notwithstanding) with shows from big-name DJs (and now Apple employees) Zane Lowe, Julie Adenuga, and Ebro Darden — along with some hour blocks of semi-hosted shows peppered in between. Beats 1 went down at approximately 8:30PM ET during Requests with Travis Mills in Los Angeles, which is / was set to run until St. Vincent's block from 10PM–11PM ET.
Worldwide. Always Error Code -12642. pic.twitter.com/uPANtXC1ze
— Casey Kolderup (@ckolderup) July 1, 2015
It's unclear what happened. A number of tweets and a Y Combinator post suggest Amazon EC2 US east web server might be at fault, although at this time Amazon's status page is showing no problems.
Still, I'd like to think Jaden's request was just too much for the world to handle.
Breaking: Jaden Smith just called into Beats 1 radio to request the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" theme song to be played worldwide. And it was
— Ross Miller (@ohnorosco) July 1, 2015