'The Joe Rogan Experience,' Spotify's flagship podcast, mysteriously vanished from the streaming platform twice in the span of a week

• Joe Rogan's podcast disappeared from Spotify's catalogue on Monday and Friday.
• The first outage led to speculation that Spotify had blocked Rogan, the Los Angeles Times reported.

"The Joe Rogan Experience," the top podcast on Spotify, disappeared from the streaming platform's mobile apps and website twice within a week, several media outlets reported.

All episodes of Rogan's podcast were inaccessible on Monday morning, The Independent first reported, but they were back online as of Monday evening.

The popular show also vanished briefly last Friday; Spotify said at the time that several other podcasts had been affected, and it blamed technical issues, Rolling Stone reported. The hourlong shortage instigated speculation among fans that Rogan had been blocked from the platform, the Los Angeles Times reported.

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While Spotify hasn't said why the podcast went down a second time, the outages occurred several weeks after Rogan drew backlash for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and became the center of a debate about free speech on the platform.

The musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell both asked Spotify to remove their music from the platform in protest of Rogan's comments. Spotify's CEO, Daniel Ek, defended Rogan, saying that his platform wouldn't silence the former "Fear Factor" host and that "canceling voices is a slippery slope."

In May 2020, Spotify announced that it would exclusively host "The Joe Rogan Experience." The New York Times recently reported that the deal was said to be worth about $200 million.

Spotify did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.