Amazon Alexa Users Report Problems with Smart Assistant on Christmas

• Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa has been having a difficult time responding to voice commands on Christmas day.
• The ongoing issue is likely to be caused by a large number of holiday shoppers buying Echo devices and using the assistant.
• Amazon is currently working towards fixing the issues, and we should expect a resolution soon.

It seems like Amazon’s smart assistant Alexa decided to take the day off on Christmas day with a large number of users reporting extended periods of downtime when using the assistant or smart speakers. According to reports, the overwhelming amount of usage during Christmas might have stressed out the servers enough to cause issues.

According to Amazon’s own reports, over 50 million Echo devices have been sold since its introduction, and all of them are powered by Alexa. Going by Down Detector’s statistics, over 1800 reports were logged, and it is likely that a lot more users were affected who did not report the downtime on the website.

Image Courtesy of Down Detector

Common issues faced by users include the smart speaker being unable to understand voice commands and, in some cases, Alexa became completely unresponsive. A number of users posted their Echo devices’ failings on social media.

Amazon’s smart assistant is not the first service that has faced downtime during the holiday season. Sony’s PlayStation Network has been erratic in recent times with a large number of new users buying the Japanese manufacturer’s consoles. It seems like something similar happened this year with Amazon. With a number of new Echo and Fire devices being released and offers from the e-commerce giant causing people to pick up the devices by the numbers, the company was very likely not prepared for facing such high server activity.

The outage reports are from all over the world with UK users being affected the most. Amazon customer representatives replied to affected users that they are working on the issue. We hope users are able to enjoy the holiday season with their gadgets soon enough!

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