Update: Amazon has confirmed to TechRadar that there was an issue with its service, but it has now been fixed.
“For a short period yesterday morning we had an issue that intermittently impacted some Alexa customers’ ability to interact with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally,” a spokesperson told us.
Original story continues below:
The Amazon Alexa voice assistant is down in the UK, Germany, and other parts of Europe, according to reports from multiple users on Christmas morning.
This is a problem, as millions of people unwrap Amazon Echo speakers for Christmas around the world, and Amazon’s Alexa AI is what powers these smart speakers.
There are outage spikes for Christmas morning if you look at Down Detector, and the heat map for Alexa being down focuses on the UK and Germany.
Some users are now reporting that Alexa is beginning to come online for them, while others are experiencing limited functionality. In other words, stick with it.
Is Alexa down in the US and elsewhere?
The US doesn’t appear to be affected right now by the same Amazon Alexa outage, at least not yet. We tested it this morning to make sure.
However, as more users unwrap, unbox, and set up Alexa-powered speakers, that always could change. We’ll keep monitoring the outage situation in the US.
The Amazon Echo Dot was Amazon’s most popular gift in the lead up to the holidays. It’s clearly going to strain its massive servers this morning.
Source: techradar.com