Amazon’s Alexa suffers outages on Christmas Day as device appeared to cope with onslaught of new users

Amazon’s Alexa suffered outages on Christmas Day as the smart devices appeared to struggle with the onslaught of new users. Owners took to social media to vent frustration at their malfunctioning gadgets, reporting the unsatisfactory responses they had been getting from Alexa. These included the virtual assistant, which can play music, make calls, answer questions and control smart home devices, saying that she was “having trouble understanding” and asking users to “please try a little later”. Amazon's customer services channels, which were inundated with messages from disappointed customers about the Alexa breakdown, explained yesterday morning that problems were an “ongoing issue” which could take 12-24 hours to resolve.    The tech giant did not state what had led to the mass breakdown, but customers speculated that the service was struggling to cope with thousands of new users who were given either Alexa or Amazon’s Echo Dot 2, the wireless smart speaker, as a Christmas present. Dan Green wrote on Twitter: “[It] seems that your servers weren’t ready for the massive influx of new Echo’s being registered today. “When the waiting list for new Dot’s is two months you’d have thought the geek squad would have been prepared” Others joked that “everybody deserves at least one day off” over Christmas, but “perhaps today was not the day” for the virtual home assistant to pick. By 12.50pm on Christmas Day, Amazon Help, the tech giant’s customer services Twitter account, said: “Hi, over the past two hours some Echo devices in Europe have had intermittent connections.” It added that the issues “have now been resolved and the Alexa Service is working normally”. An Amazon spokesperson said: "For a short period [on Tuesday] morning we had an issue that intermittently impacted some Alexa customers’ ability to interact with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally."

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