Update: Amazon says the issue was resolved by 2pm yesterday (September 26). In a statement it 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.
Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is experiencing apparent outages across the UK leaving many people unable to use their Echo devices, according to a number of reports from users this morning.
Reports from users on Twitter and data from the Down Detector website suggest the outages began at around 8am on Wednesday September 26. Problems appear to have been experienced across the UK, as well as in parts of Europe.
The difficulties users are sharing range from Alexa telling users: "Sorry I'm having trouble understanding right now please try again later" through to Alexa not working at all. It's not clear how widespread the issues are, or whether they're related to particular Echo models.
This may not sound like a big deal to those who don't rely on Alexa as part of their daily routines, but as many do it seems like alarms didn't go off, lights didn't come on and a range of other smart home inconveniences took place when users were trying to go about their morning routines.
It's not clear at the moment exactly how many users are affected or why the outage has happened at all. But we'll update this story when we find out more.
