Amazon had the most talked about ads during the recently concluded Super Bowl. In one of those ads, the company's Alexa virtual assistant loses her voice all of a sudden. Now, it appears fiction has transitioned into reality.
A regional outage impacting Amazon's servers is apparently causing Alexa to be unresponsive toward commands. One user took to Twitter to upload a video of their Echo Dot performing sluggish and not answering queries in its usual speedy manner.
Amazon Alexa Loses Her Voice, Just Like In The Super Bowl Ad
Down Detector, a site that collects information about downtimes, reported a huge spike in the number of people complaining about Alexa in the morning of March 2. Outages were spread across the United States.
Several publications have confirmed that Alexa is indeed acting up, with The Verge finding similar performance snags with its Echo Dot and Business Insider noting that the experience of using Alexa has been slow and buggy. Asking any Alexa-powered device to do anything, such as playing a song, might cause it to say something like: "Sorry, something went wrong."
Because it's a server problem and not an Alexa-specific problem, all integrations — from controlling music playback to using Alexa skills to turning off smart light bulbs — appear to be affected. It's worth noting that Alexa is still somewhat able to carry out commands in some cases, but others have found that it doesn't follow them at all, especially if the assistant says it's having internet connection troubles.
Amazon Web Services
In the same report, The Verge says Alexa returned to normal after a few hours, responding to voice commands properly again. The common belief says the slowdowns are tied to a problem within Amazon Web Services, the company's popular and highly successful cloud computing platform. For added perspective, Slack and other applications that depend on AWS as a backbone also experienced downtime earlier in the day, indicating that there might have been indeed some snags with AWS.
Check out some Twitter reactions below:
Is Amazon Alexa down? I've never seen it with a red ring and tell me it can't understand right now. — J (@pueblokc) March 2, 2018
Is Amazon Alexa down? Not connecting. Internet is fine but she can do much at the moment. @amazonecho @amazon — Ed Duber (@ED3Jeep) March 2, 2018
#Amazon Alexa is down right now. "I'm sorry. I am having trouble understanding right now. Please try a little later" — Eli (@eli_fjr) March 2, 2018
Seems that @amazon Alexa services are down. Shocking that an all knowing all hearing bodiless voice connected by invisible wires to millions of people is having issues. Skynet will soon be back online & destroying us all! Also, I can't turn my lights on w/ my voice and I'm sad. — Joshua C. Day (@JoshDayComedy) March 2, 2018
All my #Alexa #echo devices are offline. pic.twitter.com/G7A6iT5D94 — Cory Church (@tech4eleven) March 2, 2018
