Alexa DOWN – Amazon helper stopped working, ‘ignored users’ and wouldn’t turn off
Alexa DOWN – Amazon helper stopped working, ‘ignored
users’ and wouldn’t turn off
The artificial intelligence has gone rogue
By Sean Keach, Digital Technology and Science Editor
Updated: 16th January 2019, 3:00 pm
AMAZON'S virtual assistant Alexa stopped working for some
users around the world on Wednesday morning.
The mysterious outage meant that Alexa – typically
controlled by voice – was "ignoring" user requests.
When did the Alexa outage take place?
Outage tracker Down Detector received hundreds of reports
about Alexa not working at around 8am UK time – and was resolved about an hour
later.
Most of the reports were related to either server
connections not working, or problems with logging into Alexa.
A global outage map showed that users were experiencing
issues around the world, although primarily in the UK and Europe – which was
just waking up.
A large number of reports also came in from the USA,
although the majority of America was sleeping at the time.
The issue appears to affect all countries where Amazon
Echo devices are available.
What did Alexa users have to say?
One user on Twitter wrote: "Anybody else's Alexa
ignoring them this morning?
"It played my local radio station after a while, but
won't do anything else. Just ignoring me. Won't even turn off."
Another Brit complained: "Anyone else got a problem
with Alexa this morning? Refusing to talk to me, just a spinny blue light and
then goes off."
On Down Detector, a user complained that he couldn't
control his smart home: "Won't turn up the heating, and is thinking long
and hard about whether to turn lights on or off."
Alexa is an "intelligent" personal assistant
built by Amazon.
• You can find
her on several different devices, including Amazon's Echo speakers.
• Alexa responds
to voice commands, and can talk back to you.
• She can
perform thousands of different tasks, including telling you about the news or
weather.
• But she can do
more complex things too, like ordering a pizza or arranging an Uber taxi
pick-up.
• To activate
Alexa, you need to say "Alexa" to an Amazon Echo speaker.
• Alexa
currently only works in English and German languages.
• Because she's
powered by artificial intelligence, Alexa is constantly getting smarter.
• Alexa will
also get more used to your voice, and better understand what you want her to do
over time.
Other users suggested that their Amazon Echo devices were
working perfectly, which may have meant the Alexa problems weren't a total
outage.
Has Amazon explained what caused the outage?
In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told The Sun:
"For a short period this morning we had an issue that impacted some Alexa
customers’ ability to interact with the service.
"The Alexa service is now operating normally."
However, Amazon declined to say exactly what caused the
outage.
It's likely that some kind of server issue was behind the
downtime: Alexa voice requests are sent to Amazon servers over the internet,
and then replies are bounced back, so a problem with servers would cause Alexa
to fail.
Sadly, Amazon is keeping mum about the gaffe for now.
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