Amazon’s Alexa temporarily went down this morning as Echo users reported a range of issues with the voice assistant.
While there’s no official record of where the outage occurred, users in the UK, Ireland, Spain, Germany and Italy all appeared to experience issues with Alexa across Alexa-powered services included Amazon Echo speakers, Fire TV Sticks and the Amazon Alexa app.
The outage also affected Alexa users’ abilities to control connected smart devices, such as alarms and smart lighting.
A chart tracking Amazon Web Services outages by Downdetector showed that reports of issues began coming in at 6:55am GMT. The reports peaked at 8:10am – most likely to indicate when the majority of users woke up and realised their Echo devices were out of service.
According to Forbes, voice commands to Alexa devices were met with alerts that Alexa had lost its connection and “something went wrong”. Some users were even given the silent treatment by their smart speakers.
Other issues reported included devices showing as offline, a red light ring in place of the usual blue and Alexa being slow to process requests, while the smart assistant told some Echo users “I’m having difficulty understanding right now” (via TechRadar).
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As of around 9am, the number of reports of the outage appeared to be on a steady decline, indicating that Amazon had begun work resolving the issue.
Though it wasn’t until 10am that things seemed almost back to normal, with a few Echo stragglers continuing to report problems with the voice assistant.
While it isn’t often that Alexa goes down for several hours in a day, it’s still an inconvenience when it does and the number of complaints that rolled in on social media show just how integral smart speakers and voice assistants have become to many users’ daily routines.
An Amazon spokesperson told Trusted Reviews: “This morning we had an issue that impacted some Alexa customers’ ability to interact with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally”.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
