Alexa users report outages and other issues

While Amazon does not have an outage status page for its consumer products like the Amazon Echo line of smart speakers, anecdotal evidence from around the world suggests that whatever system powers Alexa is experiencing some sort of outage. Down Detector is also reporting a spike in Alexa-related complaints.

The image above depicts an Amazon Echo Dot with a red circle and red microphone display, something that many users claim to have never seen before. When trying to communicate with Alexa, responses are thrown back like, “I’m not sure what went wrong,” and “Sorry, something went wrong.”

With many users utilizing Alexa to operate smart home devices like lights and appliances, an Alexa outage could mean the difference between them sitting in darkness or not.

In news that may or may not be related, Capital One is experiencing outages as well. The bank uses Amazon Web Services for its various sites, and one would assume that Alexa has some sort of connection to AWS as well. However, the AWS outage site shows green across the board.

All is not lost, as some Alexa services still work if you access them through the Alexa smartphone app rather than through Echo hardware. However, your mileage may vary.

There’s a lot of easy jokes to make about Alexa “losing her voice” here since Amazon’s advertising made that very joke around the Super Bowl. But this is a classy site, and we won’t make any obvious jokes like, “Looks like Alexa needs to visit an Otolaryngologist!” That would just be beneath us.

If you’re experiencing an Alexa outage, let us know in the comments what the exact issues are!