Amazon Alexa down: the smart assistant is struggling to find her voice

January 21, 2022 ,

There are widespread reports that Amazon's smart voice assistant, Alexa, is currently down. 

According to Down detector, Amazon, Alexa and Amazon Web Services started to see a spike in issues from just before 2am ET / 7am GMT on January 21, 2022.

The service is down in the UK, but we're also getting reports from our teams in Germany and Italy that Alexa is also not working in other European countries.

Widespread reports from around the internet suggest there are major issues with Amazon's Alexa network, rendering the smart assistant useless for owners of Amazon Echo speakers and other devices which support the AI.

We have contacted Amazon for comment, and will bring you all the latest on the service outage right here, as it happens.

Amazon outage in the UK

The Amazon outage is definitely affecting UK users, with our own Carrie Marshall providing this nugget of information.

"Just had my dad on the phone complaining all his Echo devices say 'something has gone wrong' when he tries to use them. Mine are working but are taking a long time (around 20 seconds) to process the request."

There appears to be a variety of issues people are facing with their Alexa and Echo devices today.

  • Devices showing as 'offline'
  • A red light ring (rather than the normal blue)
  • Voice prompts such as "I'm having difficulty understanding right now" and "'something has gone wrong"
  • Very slow to process requests

Not gonna lie, I'm sitting here smugly at home as I went down the Google Assistant route for my smart home setup, rather than opting for Alexa, and everything is working smoothly for me.

However, it just goes to show how fragile the smart home is, with a heavy reliance on connectivity and external factors that can render it relatively useless at the drop of a hat.

Today it's Amazon suffering the outage, but it could just as easily be Apple's Siri or Google's Assistant next time. Robots aren't quite ready to take over the planet just yet then.

Have spoken to the in-laws, and they confirm their Echo Dot is not working, even after a hard reset.

And we're seeing plenty of you experiencing the same problem - let us know the issues you're facing this morning by tweeting us @techradar.

Alexa, why are you so mean?

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Reports from my German and Italian colleagues confirm Alexa is also experiencing issues in the rest of Europe - this is a major outage for Amazon which is affecting millions.



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