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Amazon’s Alexa was down for a huge part of today in Europe

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Amazon Alexa users across Europe were assistant-less for part of today. Users reported that Alexa went down in various countries, including Germany, Spain, and parts of the UK. The issues appear to have started around 8AM GMT, with the service coming online again around 2PM GMT, according to Twitter users. It’s unclear what caused the outage, although Engadget posits that it might because of a reported error at the Amazon Web Services facility in Ireland. (That issue is now marked as corrected online.)

Most people online seem to be upset that Amazon gave no update or word about what was happening and why. It’s totally understandable that they’d be frustrated. Given that Amazon wants people to turn their homes into complete Alexa hubs, down to their microwaves, the company needs to be more open about outages and communicative about why the assistant isn’t responsive. We’ve reached out to Amazon for further comment and will update when we hear back.



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