Amazon Alexa down: Global giant suffers worldwide outage
Amazon leaves users in the dark.
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Is Amazon Alexa down? The virtual assistant has suffered a global outage, according to reports. Over the past decade or so, we’ve seen the proliferation of things such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and others enter the rising with their smart-home technology. With the internet of things now featuring everything from your lights to your toilet. What happens if it all goes down? This waking nightmare became reality for Amazon Alexa users earlier, as they suffered a global outage that wiped out the entire network of voice assistants across the globe.
Update: January 31 at 16:00 GMT. A representative from Amazon reached out to us with the following:
Yesterday evening we had an issue that impacted some Alexa customers’ ability to interact with the sercice. The Alexa service is now operating normally
Amazon Spokesperson
Amazon seems to have left users in the dark, both literally and figuratively with regards to the service status of these devices. But, we’re here to help and get into the weeds to see what’s really going down at Casa-de-Bezos.
Is Amazon Alexa down?
Amazon has stated to us that the service is now up and running. The recent outage could be due to a server issue happening over at Amazon, though it is still unprecedented that the entire network goes down. They’re likely to try to restore the network piece by piece and region by region rather than attempting to get the entire service up and running all at once. There appears to be a partial restoration of services, documented by users over on Reddit.
One likely scenario for the service going down is the rollout of a global update to the servers, which may have broken parts of its infrastructure in the process. The likelihood is that Amazon engineers may be scrambling to roll back the updates and attempt to get it all back up and running again. It’s difficult to ascertain exactly what happened to cause this outage in the first place. Regardless, it’s needlessly frustrating, and unfortunately, Amazon’s very unfriendly AWS health service dashboard is currently displaying everything as being fine.
However, DownDetector reported otherwise.
It’s useful to keep your eyes on user reports at DownDetector to see if everyone else is having the same issues as you and if services look like they are still reporting issues with the service as Amazon scrambles to fix this issue.
Does Alexa say something went wrong?
Worry not, this is a standard response to the device being down, as a result of the most recent outages as we’ve described above. You can expect the issue of Alexa saying something went wrong to disappear as soon as the issues subside, which they should have been as of our latest update.
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