Alexa ‘Lost Her Voice’ Friday Morning Amid Widespread Outages

Amazon’s humorous 2018 Super Bowl ad has apparently come true this morning. Yes, Alexa has lost her voice, according to a flood of anecdotal user reports and outage tracking services.

The issues, which began around 7:30 a.m. Pacific Time, impacted Amazon Echo devices in certain regions across the U.S.

Affected Echo products apparently become unresponsive, or will fail to understand simple user inquiries. Users also report Alexa responding with “Sorry, something went wrong” or similar error phrases.

If queries don’t time out, users report Alexa taking much longer than usual to respond to them. In other cases, the Amazon smart speakers produce a tone and state that they’ve lost connection. Some devices seem to automatically go into “mute” mode, showing a highlighted red microphone icon and ring around the device, indicating that there’s a problem.

While Amazon doesn’t have a specific outage page for its consumer products, user reports are flooding social media. Third-party outage tracking site Down Detector also noted a significant spike in Alexa-related issues across the U.S.

The problems seem to be tied to outages affecting Amazon servers, specifically its Amazon Web Services, GeekWire reported. AWS also stated this morning that they were investigating “increased packet loss” affecting users in the Eastern U.S. While some of the issues seem to have been resolved, social media users are still reporting sporadic problems.

Other services and websites that rely on Amazon Web Services seem to be affected as well. For example, Capital One customers are reporting widespread issues with accessing their accounts online or in-app. The company acknowledged the downtime in a series of tweets Friday morning.

iDrop News tested two Amazon Echo devices on the West Coast and found mixed results. An Echo Dot timed out during a simple weather request, while an Echo tied to a separate Amazon account functioned normally.

The real-world outages come just about a month after Amazon aired its now unfortunately ironic 2018 Super Bowl ad, which depicted an “Alexa losing her voice” scenario much like the one Amazon users are experiencing today.

As of the time of writing, Cardi B or Gordon Ramsay have not stepped in for Amazon’s digital assistant, however.