Amazon Echos and other Alexa-enabled devices were so popular as gifts this holiday season that Amazon’s systems experienced an outage in Europe, leaving many owners unable to use the virtual assistant.
It seems Amazon Echos were a very popular gift this holiday season, at least in Europe. If you’re based in Europe, it’s likely that you experienced disruption to your Alexa virtual assistant on Christmas Day because of it. Voice commands on Christmas Day overwhelmed Amazon’s servers and Alexa crashed, leaving many new or old users unable to do anything with their devices, receiving a polite “Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding you right now.”
According to a report by The Guardian, Down Detector saw crashes across the UK and Germany mainly, but many other parts of Europe were also affected. The issue has now been resolved in these regions but could reappear, as you may remember a similar outage across Europe in September. No crashes have been reported so far in the and the United States.
Amazon’s Alexa-enabled smart speakers are currently the most popular such devices on the market, and it seems they got even more popular this Christmas. The best seller according to Amazon was the Echo Dot, and this can also be witnessed by the appearance of the Amazon Alexa app at the top of the iOS App Store. Also very popular were Google’s Home smart speakers, as the Google Home app came in at sixth place.
I love the weird surge of top App Store apps after people open their presents on Christmas Day pic.twitter.com/i3A1Kps88N
— Robert Andersen (@rsa) December 26, 2018
Problems started appearing around 10 am GMT, but Amazon’s customer service account later tweeted “some Echo devices in Europe have had intermittent connections.” At that point, the company said the issues had been resolved.
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