Amazon's Alexa suffers widespread outage


Amazon's Alexa AI assistant went down on Friday for what's turning out to be an unintentional reenactment of the company's Super Bowl commercial.
Reports of Alexa outages are coming from across the US, and even in some international locations. However, an Echo device in the ZDNet newsroom in Louisville shows that Alexa is still up and running.
It appears that the outage was caused by a network problem in AWS US East-1 in Northern Virginia. According to Down Detector, users began reporting problems with Alexa around 9:30 am ET. AWS Direct Connect customers including Atlassian, Twilio and MongoDB have also reported problems.
Amazon has yet to issue a statement on the system outage. Nevertheless, the Internet is having fun with the irony.
We've reached out to Amazon for comment and will update this post when we receive a reply.
PREVIOUS AND RELATED COVERAGE
Amazon redesigns Alexa Skills Developer Console
Amazon's new beta for developing Alexa skills is centered around build, test, launch, and measure phases.
Hey Alexa! Hey Google! Smarter IoT is all about context
Stacey Higginbotham, host of The Internet of Things Podcast, describes the need for IoT devices to understand context and perform without being given specific voice commands for every last detail.
Amazon Alexa adds ability to send SMS messages by voice
Alexa is still missing iOS support and the ability to read messages to users.