After going offline for about two hours, Amazon Alexa is now reportedly operating normally, according to the company. The e-commerce giant confirmed this news on one tech site.

Alexa Outage Error Message

According to a report by The Independent, some individuals initially complained about what could have gone wrong to the voice assistant. They said that there was a message that continuously bugged them in the first place.

In the same article by the UK-based news outlet, Alexa users over the globe were seen to have reported the issue. This means that all Amazon owners might have encountered this problem at the time.

Per Down Detector, the issue began to kick off at around 7:00 A.M. GMT on Friday, Jan. 21. Aside from the virtual voice assistant, Amazon Web Services also went offline during the incident.

In addition, the UK users were the first to experience sudden downtime before the issue spread in other parts of Europe, such as Italy and Germany.

On top of that, people could have been facing the following issues for both Echo and Alexa devices during the time of interruption.

  • Red light ring appears instead of blue 
  • Connected devices go offline despite being connected to the internet
  • Voice prompts are not working
  • Too sluggish to handle and process many requests

Related Article: Amazon Launches Alexa Together to Help Caregivers Remotely Monitor Aging Patients

Amazon Alexa Now Back at Service

After enduring a two-hour-long outage, Alexa users felt a sigh of relief after the issue was resolved. Amazon confirmed via TechRadar that the outage has ended for now.

According to the Seattle company, the Alexa service is now operating normally after encountering an issue in the morning.

As of press time, Amazon has not yet determined the actual cause behind this downtime. 

Somehow, some users noticed that the service had improved already. Software writer Daryl Baxter happily notified the site that his Amazon Echo Dot is now back in action.

Baxter praised Down Detector for quickly informing the users regarding this issue. The real-time app monitor said that the Alexa outage was indeed showing signs of improvement in connection to this.

Alexa Can Collect Your Data 

In another Alexa-related report, Tech Times wrote in October that the digital voice assistant could potentially collect users' recordings without any permission. We noted that there's a way to request your data from the company.

To retrieve your desired audio clips, you first need to go to the Request My Data page and submit your immediate request.

If you are a phone user, you can delete your short voice clips right away by going to your device's Settings, then "Alexa Privacy."

Elsewhere, we also wrote last month that the Alexa.com website would not accept new accounts anymore. The schedule for the removal of the Alexa Rank is in May 2022. 

Read Also: Amazon Wants Users to Have 'Less' Talk With Alexa | Company Expects More Improvements For AI Assistant

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Joseph Henry 

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