Amazon’s Alexa smart assistant seems to be down this morning. We’ve been hearing reports over the last hour of either delayed responses or just total loss of connection.
While Amazon doesn’t have a status page for its consumer products, Down Detector is reporting a huge spike in Alexa-related complaints over the last hour.
For example, Alexa is giving me replies like “I’m not sure what went wrong”, “sorry, something went wrong”, or a loud chime followed by “sorry, your echo dot lost its connection” and the red ring of sadness. The problem appears to be related to Alexa’s voice recognition servers, as it’s occurring across both native devices like an Echo and 3rd party devices running Alexa like the Sonos One.
Is Amazon Alexa down? I've never seen it with a red ring and tell me it can't understand right now.
— J (@pueblokc) March 2, 2018
Some Alexa services still work if you access them through the Alexa app. For an ultimate example of first world problems, I couldn’t turn on my lights this morning with Alexa, but I was eventually able to manually toggle them on and off by using the Alexa iPhone app (because there was no was I was actually walking over to them and bending down to the floor switch).
We hope Alexa feels better soon – plus, it’s hard to miss the irony here – considering Amazon just ran a Super Bowl ad campaign a few weeks ago where Alexa “lost her voice”.
We’ve reached out to Amazon and will update this when we get more information.
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