Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant has gone down in the UK and parts of Europe.
According to Down Detector, users started experiencing issues at around 8am BST, and the problems persisted throughout the rest of the morning and carried on into the early afternoon.
Read more: Which Amazon Echo speaker should you buy?
Echo users have been reporting that their requests have been met with the so-called ‘red ring of death’, and that they’re seeing the following message on the Alexa smartphone app: “Sorry, we’re experiencing system issues. Alexa isn’t responding as fast as usual. We’re working to fix this.”
The outage appears to mainly affect Echo users based in the UK and Germany. It isn’t clear what caused the issue in the first place, but the outage is proving especially troublesome with users who have gone all-in with smart home devices.
Alexa is down in the UK. Time to resurrect this old #cartoon #alexadown pic.twitter.com/DwuatqtDUL
— Andrew Fraser (@cartoonsidrew) September 26, 2018
Some unlucky individuals say they didn’t realise Amazon was experiencing problems, and tried to fix their Echo devices themselves by performing a factory reset. Frustrating.
Read more: Best Alexa skills
Fortunately, some users have started reporting that they’re once again seeing signs of life from the virtual assistant.
If you’re still experiencing issues with Alexa, you can report them to Amazon’s support team by following this link.
Were you affected by the outage? Share your experiences with us on Twitter @TrustedReviews.
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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.
