Alexa down: Amazon voice assistant outage affects UK users
Update: 12.20pm: The issue affecting Amazon’s Alexa service appears to have been resolved.
An Amazon spokesperson told Metro.co.uk: ‘This morning we had an issue that impacted some Alexa customers’ ability to interact with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally.’
Original story: Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant appears to be suffering an outage affecting some customers in the UK.
The company’s Echo speakers are reportedly unable to respond to commands, according to users.
Some are reporting seeing a ring of red lights and hearing a warning message to try again later.
Reports started to emerge on the website DownDetector at around 7am on Friday morning, with more than 8,000 reports recorded since then.
‘All my six devices in Lanarkshire have been down for at least an hour,’ wrote Alexa user Colin Purves on DownDetector.
‘No music in the kitchen this morning! Surprised this can happen with Amazon, who re-sell their web server services to other large businesses. Not a great advertisement.
‘Just one day offline after many years of use is not a bad record though.
‘My heart goes out to the person below who was using Alexa as an alarm. Have a great day all.’
Amazon’s virtual assistant has become ubiquitous in the UK, with thousands of households utilising them for entertainment, learning and even controlling their smart home devices.
Many people took to Twitter to check that others were experiencing the same problems.
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