Jordan O'BrienIt seems that Amazon’s infamous super bowl ad has become somewhat of a reality for those in the UK and Europe, as the company’s Alexa smart assistant went down today. Normal service is said to have resumed as of 2pm UK time, but reports began flooding in at around 8am – that means some users have had to go without their smart assistants for six hours.
This is not the first time Alexa has been out of action, with the service having been down several times over the past year. Usually the outage affects more than just the Alexa voice assistant, however, and that appears to be the case once again. That’s because Amazon also reported problems with its AWS services in Ireland, which could be the root cause of today’s outage.
When Alexa goes down, it can have a serious knock on effect to users who own smart homes. Amazon has increasingly been pushing for the voice assistant to form the central hub of any smart home – and an outage like this could prevent consumers from controlling a myriad of devices. Instead of turning on and off lighting with voice control, Alexa users were instead met with a red ring and the ‘sorry I’m having trouble understanding right now please try again later’ message.
While some users are still reportedly experiencing issues with their Alexa-enabled device, Amazon is suggesting a restart could bring those devices back to life.