Alexa Down: Amazon's assistant went down this morning

Amazon's Alexa temporarily went down this forenoon as Echo users reported a range of problems with the voice assistant.

While there's no official record of where the outage occurred, users in the UK, Ireland, Espana, Germany and Italy all appeared to experience problems with Alexa across Alexa-powered services included Amazon Echo speakers, Fire Telly Sticks and the Amazon Alexa app.

The outage also affected Alexa users' abilities to control connected smart devices, such as alarms and smart lighting.

A nautical chart tracking Amazon Web Services outages by Downdetector showed that reports of issues began coming in at six:55am GMT. The reports peaked at 8:10am – almost likely to indicate when the majority of users woke up and realised their Echo devices were out of service.

According to Forbes, voice commands to Alexa devices were met with alerts that Alexa had lost its connection and "something went wrong". Some users were even given the silent treatment by their smart speakers.

Other problems reported included devices showing as offline, a red light ring in place of the usual blue and Alexa being slow to process requests, while the smart assistant told some Repeat users "I'one thousand having difficulty understanding right now" (via TechRadar).

Y'all might like…

As of effectually 9am, the number of reports of the outage appeared to be on a steady refuse, indicating that Amazon had begun work resolving the upshot.

Though it wasn't until 10am that things seemed almost back to normal, with a few Echo stragglers continuing to report issues with the voice banana.

While it isn't often that Alexa goes downward for several hours in a twenty-four hour period, it's still an inconvenience when it does and the number of complaints that rolled in on social media show merely how integral smart speakers and vocalism administration have become to many users' daily routines.

An Amazon spokesperson told Trusted Reviews: "This morn we had an outcome that impacted some Alexa customers' power to collaborate with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally".