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Is Alexa down? AWS issues knock-out smart homes

Is Alexa Down? AWS issues in the Unites States are causing problems for Alexa devices and the company’s Ring smart doorbell users.

The company’s AWS Service page lists outings in the US-EAST-1 Region which has knocked out some of Amazon’s own services, like Alexa, Ring and third-party services running on the infrastructure.

The errors began appearing mid-morning eastern time in the United States, with many users noticing their Alexa devices become unresponsive.

Personally, I was informed: “It looks like I can’t reach your couch (lights) right now, maybe because of a Hue issue? We’ve let them know there’s a problem.” The problem, in fact, lies at Amazon’s door. My LG TV isn’t responding to Alexa commands either. “Sorry TV isn’t responding,” she replied when I requested she turned on the TV.

“We are seeing impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon says on the AWS status website. That region is set in the state of Virginia in the United States.

“This issue is also affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tooling, which is delaying our ability to provide updates. We have identified the root cause and are actively working towards recovery.”

None of the other regions appear to be suffering from major issues, but the Down Detector website is showing outage spikes for Alexa, Ring and a number of other platforms hosting their platforms on the AWS servers – even the likes of Disney Plus, Roku, Cash, and Venmo. Popular online video games like League of Legends are also being affected along with other Amazon services like Prime Music and the Internet Movie Database (IMdB).

Trusted Reviews has contacted Amazon for updates on the situation and will update this post if and when a response is forthcoming. I’ll also let you know if my TV and smart lights start responding again.

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