Amazon Alexa went down on Christmas Day: Details here
Amazon's Alexa is pretty handy for day-to-day tasks, but on Christmas, the smart assistant served a nasty surprise - it went down. Multiple users took to Twitter to note that the assistant was having trouble registering new devices or handling queries. However, after some two hours the issue was resolved, Amazon's customer service confirmed. Here's more on the issue.
Error on handling queries, registering devices
The outage, first reported by The Guardian, began at about 3:30 pm IST on December 25. Alexa failed to register new devices and answered queries by saying "Sorry, I'm having trouble understanding you right now." and "Please try again later". Naturally, this frustrated many, especially those who wanted to use their Alexa devices for playing festive songs, turning on lights, or getting cooking instructions.
Complaints flooded from Europe
Notably, the complaints on Twitter were more pronounced from UK, Germany, and other parts of Europe. Even the heat map on Downdetector suggested the same.
However, after 2 hours the issues were resolved
Some two hours after the issue started appearing, Amazon Help confirmed that "some Echo devices in Europe have had intermittent connections". However, the service did note that the issues have been resolved and the assistant began working normally. Amazon didn't provide detailed insights into the issue, but many speculated it could be due to excessive load on its servers.
Amazon sold record Alexa devices this Christmas
Amazon has confirmed its Alexa devices, particularly the Echo and Echo Dot lineup, were best-selling devices of the holiday season. This seems to suggest the addition of several users, all looking to set up Alexa devices around the same time, proved too much for Amazon's servers. And, naturally, when servers get loaded, Alexa, which relies on them for delivering responses, would get affected too.
