If you’re wondering why Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa has gone quiet today, it’s because the platform that powers Alexa is experiencing an outage.
A regional outage impacting Amazon’s AWS Services has led to Alexa becoming unresponsive on Echo products and other devices that support the digital assistant. For example, I just tried to get weather information from my Echo next to me, and the signature blue ring stayed lit up for about 15 seconds with no answers from the assistant. A tone eventually came out o the silence, and Alexa said it list connection.
After trying for multiple attempts, it produced a red ring accompanied by Alexa asking to try again at a later time. We have reached out to Amazon for details on what happened and when the digital assistant will be back up and running. Earlier today, Slack and other applications that use AWS as a backbone also experienced some downtime earlier today.
