If you ask Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant a question right now, you may not get an answer. It went quiet for users in many locations Friday because of an outage within Amazon’s cloud data service, AWS.
Down Detector reported a huge spike in the number of people reporting problems with the digital assistant, the brain in some of Amazon’s connected home products like the Echo smart speaker, starting at 9:39 am ET. Outages were reported across the United States, causing Alexa to either respond to questions by saying, “I’m not sure what went wrong” or “Sorry, your Echo Dot lost its connection,” reference to the smaller version of the Echo.
While widespread, it doesn’t appear to be affecting all Alexa users. Coins2Day was able to ask the weather and interact with an Echo Dot in California around 1pm ET; however, the problem appears to be ongoing for others.
The problem is somewhat ironic given the company’s recent Super Bowl commercial in which Alexa loses her voice. Here’s hoping that she finds it again soon.