Alexa Went Down in Europe for Several Hours (Updated)
Amazon’s Alexa service was down for about six hours in many European countries early Friday morning. Customers reported being unable to get a response from their Echo devices at all from around 3 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern Time Friday due to what may have been issues with Amazon’s servers.
Alexa Down
Social media quickly filled with people from across the continent complaining of not getting alarms from their Alexa or not being able to do the things they usually do in the morning. The voice assistant would only respond with silence, or by saying it had lost its connection or that “something went wrong.” The issues extended to all Alexa products including Echo devices, Fire TV Sticks, and the Alexa smartphone app. Though the reports spiked rapidly, the failures weren’t universal and others in those countries reported continuing service throughout.
Alexa’s problems were reminiscent of when Amazon Web Services started experiencing cloud server issues in early December. That affected all kinds of internet services, including Alexa, and led to slowdowns and crashes around many of the services supported by Amazon’s data centers including Slack, Disney+, and major websites. The Alexa issue is more limited and seemed to have been either limited to Europe or just unnoticed in the U.S. because of the timing of the problem as it was essentially resolved by the beginning of the workday in the Americas.
We’ve asked Amazon for more information and will update as we hear back.
Update: Amazon shared a statement that didn’t give much more information than was already available. A spokesperson said, “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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Amazon Web Services Problems Are Slowing and Crashing Alexa and other Amazon Services (Updated)
