Is Amazon Alexa down in the UK, why is Alexa not working and why is Alexa not playing Spotify?
Thousands of UK Alexa users reported that their voice assistants were not working this morning.
Amazon Alexa, the smart assistant paired with the global corporation, is dealing with a UK outage today on January 21.
Alexa and Echo devices are compact smart home devices that work through voice activation.
They are used to set alarms, play music, organise calendars, and can also connect to other smart home devices like lights, speakers, and more.
Thousands of UK users reported issues this morning.
It seems to be part of wider problems affecting other Amazon services as well.
Here’s what you need to know about the outage.
Is Amazon Alexa down?
As of 8.18am on January 21, 7,816 people had reported issues with Alexa via DownDetector.
Of that number, 60 per cent stated they were having issues with the server connection, 21 per cent with the website, and 18 per cent with the app.
At the same time, DownDetector showed that 322 people reported issues with Amazon UK as a whole, suggesting it’s part of a wider problem.
51 per cent of these problems were to do with the website, 43 per cent to do with the app, and 6 per cent with logging in.
Why is Alexa not working?
There has been no public statement from Amazon about what the problem is and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) status page says that everything should be working normally.
Nonetheless, users are still reporting issues via DownDetector and taking to Twitter to complain about the outage.
According to social media reports, there are a range of issues with Alexa and Echo devices today.
Devices are showing as 'offline' when they shouldn’t be, or are displaying a red light ring instead of the normal blue.
Voice prompts such as ‘I'm having difficulty understanding right now’ and ‘something has gone wrong’ are very common, as well as Alexa being very slow to process requests.
Why is Alexa not playing Spotify?
Many people use Alexa and Echo devices first thing in the morning for alarms, reminders, to play music and to get news and updates about their day.
It’s a bad time for many of them to go offline, leaving thousands of users frustrated across the country.
The problems seem to be contained to the UK for the time being, including the problems with the Amazon website itself.